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Welcome to Conventionally Uncouth with Reed Goodman. The show that gives the mic to the men and women who’ve been drilling, pumping, producing, and wildcatting for decades, long before shale. This show catalogs knowledge, shares stories, and reminds us: there was a life before shale. And there will be one after. Stories straight from the oilfield, real insights, lessons learned, and (probably) a healthy pour of whiskey.
0:00 I can't believe that it's -
0:15 it's weird because there's no
0:18 like most folks if I go on another podcast they'll want to send me like an agenda beforehand or like hey what if you send me your resume let's see like what kind of things you're gonna talk about and
0:31 everything not a single one of these shows actually had somebody on the show they were like hey you know send me an agenda so I can prep or like what talks or what topics we're gonna be so I can pull
0:41 like you know some papers for it yeah I like now you just show up well hang out we'll talk we'll pull a little whiskey in we'll figure it out as we go you know I dig that so a little to no prep on on
0:54 my side I don't know maybe that makes the show terrible and we'll crash and burn in ten or twenty episodes whatever but I think the reality is you have to it has to be normal yeah like I think when I
1:05 see the ones that you can tell they're scripted I guess like you could you can see a little bit of a life is pulled out of it yeah I you I won't do it I've been asked to do a couple of And if they
1:15 have scripts, I'll intentionally not want to do it because it's like you're setting me up for For what's not natural to me, right? Right none of what I built a career on has
1:32 been Yeah, and I didn't want to go it just that same old I could see why it would be easy to go through like just that same
1:41 Interview yeah scenario of like hey, who are you? What do you do? Tell me about your resume? How old are your kids in the first 20 minutes doing all that stuff? Yeah, and they never really get
1:53 into the meat Yeah, and so I've been trying to avoid a lot of that I guess so so who out of everybody have you've had on so far has been a learning experience for you all of them Okay, every single
2:04 one of them have learned a little something. That's what I was saying earlier if I ask you something and you don't know No big deal. Oh, yeah Just punt it, you know, it's like.
2:14 But because no, I think everybody watching is trying to learn to right and that's kind of why they're watching cuz there's a bunch of There's a bunch of Knowledge like tribal knowledge. That's not
2:26 getting shared anymore. Yes as I just reached out to you this week to ask about things Yeah, I've seen a thousand things in the world, but I hate them fucking charts. I Hate them. Me too. Don't
2:37 know what I'm looking at. Yeah, and then I don't know what I'm Yeah, comparing it to you know, and so I think that there's a whole thing going and I think that you've hit it a Hit a subject matter.
2:48 That's important because most of the young guys now that have the opportunity to go out on their own Half to start in this world. Yeah 99 are not gonna go get private equity dad's friends guy went to
3:02 college with That's just not the case. Yeah So with that, I think people Have forgotten that there are real businesses here. There is real Production I still believe there's a lot of the production
3:15 America is still coming out of conventional wells. Yeah, I don't remember the percentage anymore Yeah, we I think we figured about 35 percent. Yeah, so 35 percent and probably every single one of
3:25 those wells on average is over 10 15 years old. Yeah Yeah The number of wells drilled conventional wells drilled since the shell boom took off. It's just zero. It's my new no one's no No one's
3:40 doing it statistically insignificant. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely right because I mean the reserves the booking blah blah blah You can play into all the different stuff, but I think that yeah like what
3:51 we're seeing right now and what I'm seeing with in my own little world of production is that The application to understand the conventional wells and how even tight sandstones, they're still
4:04 conventional. Well, they're tight Yep, right, but they're still the old school vertical straight down right multi-zone and come up. I think that right there world and all that understanding
4:20 ten especially for EOR now because EOR is a topic of the day you got to figure out how to get out of conventional first yeah yes you got to figure out how to get out of conventional first yes so me me
4:33 and Cassiano are chasing a play that the whole idea is that we're gonna take some of these wells that are about to be plugged and we're gonna through the vertical section in the hole we're gonna
4:47 fracture them and prove that our hydraulic fracturing recipe you know high KCL so we don't swell clays you know things like that right how many pounds of prop and per foot we're gonna prove that in a
5:01 vertical sense in a conventional sense yeah and then we might take that and try to touch more rock. Yeah, by doing a lateral.
5:10 Our whole business right now is that school techniques. So our whole business right now, it's all
5:15 the ability for us to be able to move into the Bakken and work with super majors and majors, is only because the data that we gained in the conventional. Gotcha. It's 100 based on what we've
5:28 learned there, right? You can get sandstones that are pretty tight. You can organize porosities and permeabilities and get them somewhat to kind of mimic, especially in the modeling of what we
5:38 show Because they're still tight, right? The Vicksburg down south, I think that is one of the very tightest reservoirs in production, long time down there for everybody. Yeah. So it was the data
5:49 that we got off conventional wells that led us to understand how we gotta go treat 15, 000 foot, you know, lateral, nothing different. But if you can't prove it here. Right. And I think that's
6:03 what you were saying earlier. We've forgotten about the fact that what we know about shale, really was sparked by what our understanding of conventional was. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. Well, and
6:15 then we were able to go target the source rock. Yeah, exactly. But, like, we had 100 years of education on how to do it, how to do it better. And then we've made a bunch of efficiency gains
6:28 there that we're gonna go back and reapply to some of the old stuff as well. But, like, if you think about it, say the shale boom really kicked off,
6:40 like the Barnett was kind of around the early 2000s, but call it like 2007. I was gonna say 2005, 2007. Say, yeah. Five if you were to put on the Barnett. Yep, yep, yep. Okay, in 2000 or
6:52 2004, right before it like really kicked off, there was a robust oil and gas industry. Yes. Covering the United States, drilling conventional wells, making money at it, they didn't just go away.
7:05 Yeah. Didn't just disappear. No, not at all. So many people and so much money shifted gears. Private. Unconventional. All the private equity. New York entered the game. Yep. On a scale
7:19 they'd never been in the oil business before. Yeah, that's what drove it. But it didn't go, the reservoirs didn't go away, the wells didn't go away. Production didn't go away, the companies
7:28 didn't go away. But you know what's starting
7:33 to go away? Some of that knowledge. Oh yes. Some of them old grizzly I spent half my days talking to gentlemen over the age of 60, 65 plus on their understanding of these conventional wells. And
7:46 they're so willing to give you the information. Oh shit, they're ready to unload all like a dump truck. They just don't have many people that want to sit around and talk about it. And that's
7:54 what's,
7:57 they give you all the information. All you gotta do now is as a young dude go apply it. And I think that there's a lot of data that the old-timers got. Was it written down? Mm-hmm. What's up here?
8:08 and a lot of them want to go back to them cards. Only people I can get beside you and a few other people to read them cards, gotta be over 60. Yeah. No shit. If it's not a - With total flow,
8:19 just reading out 400 NCF a day. No one else knows. Nobody knows how to calculate. Talking about a Barton chart. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you got all these little spikes going
8:30 from pressure across an orifice plate and you've gotta know the size of your orifice. You've gotta be able to read that chart as a percentage chart Is it a pressure chart? Yes. And then you've got
8:40 to back calculate in your coefficient across that orifice in your pressure drop and.
8:46 It's a pain in the ass. I think total flows are great. Yeah, absolutely. But it's what, how many wells do you go to in the conventional space, especially in South Texas, a gas well that's
8:58 sitting with that on it? Yep. I don't know any that have shifted over unless they've had a major operator take them over. Yeah. A hill corporate merit, that's at the financial end. instruction
9:08 to put that kind of data recording instrumentation on that many wells. Yeah for sure. So you see the embarth meter for me I'm like what in the hell? Like what do I do? I'm calling people like
9:21 what's going on with this thing? I'm gonna burn some of this stuff if I'm not careful Ted. And you were right yeah the dumps closed on the compressor and the compressor went off.
9:30 Perfect.
9:33 So yeah compressor was shut in so well came back with some really good flush for the next day. Like I was okay with that. Yeah yeah. But I do think that there's a massive amount. I mean I forget
9:46 the calculation. No one shall they say on primary recovery we're only recovering four to six percent of the reservoir. And I want to say in conventional we think that we're covering around 1520 on a
9:56 really good well. Yeah I think a lot of the shell stuff were on the newer completions were claiming up tonight. Up to up to up to up to 90 so 90 of the shit still on the ground. Yeah, and it's
10:09 like these guys are like, like I'm seeing wells going for sale right now and packages for wells, especially right now, where the production on them is, you know, sub six, seven barrels a day on
10:22 a well that costs18 million to drill 10 years ago. Yeah. But I know dudes out here got wells 80 years old kicking out 15 barrels a day every day, ain't missed a lick in 30 years. Yeah
10:37 Right. There's a lot of production and conventional wells. And I think that just the, I also, I wasn't an engineer by the university.
10:49 I also don't know if the engineering programs are really going that route or if they've shifted every engineer's young mind into horizontal, go big, you're heavy, sludge hammers and. Well, and
11:01 it's,
11:03 I don't want to say and conventional's are easier. But we've developed such a data set on them. Yes, and we're all about efficiency and we're all about the data But like when when you look at a lot
11:17 of these wells You might be looking at a field of seven wells Right You mess one of those up. You've messed up a seventh of your production Yes, or like a modeling frack and like the e4 sand is
11:34 totally different Yes, right how this frack's gonna grow in a in an old-school Vertical e4 like down there around Zapata or somewhere, you know in that area where you're playing like that reservoir
11:48 It's it and we don't have a ton of like Micro seismic data, and we don't have a ton of fiber optic data coming back, you know, we haven't been able to do it 80, 000 times. That's right, you know,
12:02 well, how many Eagle four I think there's 45, 000 Eagle four wells You know, like it's a huge data set to pull from to look at and that's what I will say the show boom has been good for
12:12 conventional guys Mm-hmm. This is that they've made us reorganize dad and how we look at data on Conventional well. Yeah, because the show game did bring data to the forefront as and especially
12:24 shared Yeah, right because one thing that is kind of interesting about the show kind of you're at the book the frockers Started it. I recommend a little annoyed. Okay. Yeah, there's some annoying
12:34 parts in there, but especially at least the first half Okay, you know, and I mean you get before you get to the personality the sub lifestyle is behind guys Yeah, you really understand how certain
12:43 people were we're putting things together and the information exchange that was happening between companies. Yep.
12:51 I Don't know if now the show guys are doing that as much. I'm seeing now the major Players in the conventional space that are holding 30 40 60 hundred thousand well count in the US
13:07 working side by side with the operator next door who only owns a hundred wells, and they're sharing data now. They're both trying to figure out how to make it better. Yeah, and they're working
13:14 together as teams. I'm in the middle of a project right now in South Texas where we did some jobs for an independent, independent across the fence, saw the work we did, watched the well. Well,
13:27 he's ready to go have us come do the work, but before he had to call another operator 'cause the well that he really wanted to do it on, the sales line was knocked out a year ago. So he then calls
13:37 the guy across the other fence, turn on his sales line. But he tells that company, hey, these guys touched this well for this guy over here. And without one phone call from a sales guy, I've got
13:49 two new customers, and they're all talking. And then this guy wants that treatment, but oh, well, we can't really share treatments. No, get them on the phone. We all want to do the same thing,
13:60 so we can share that. Holy shit These guys have 38 Thousand well, you're like, hey, I'm trying to get this proprietary. They're like, no, we don't care tell them. No, no, we're working
14:10 together We're telling them what we're doing. They're telling us what that's so different from 30 40 50 years. Oh, we're like 20 years ago Yeah, yeah, we had Andy Klauten on okay We were talking
14:21 about leasing land and people like watching and he'd pull a book and then that guy when he'd return that book To the shelf that guy would go like pull that book and try to figure out what he was
14:31 trying to lease Yeah, yeah, you know, that's that's what it was scout tickets like people were paid to say there were binoculars And watch how that well came in yes Yeah, and that's still I think
14:40 to the early part of the show days that was going on Yeah, I think some of that and the horizontal games gone away now. Yeah, but in the in the conventional world They're sharing I think yeah, I
14:52 think this show the the big horizontal boys. They're all wrapped tight. They're all
14:57 I Get it you guys are playing big money. I understand it, but I think what's also happening The guys at one of the operators that we're working for are much younger guys. Well, they meet across
15:08 the fence. It's been managing that field for, not managing, been drilling it and producing it and managing it for 40 years. So he's throwing shit at the wall that these guys hadn't even thought
15:20 about. Yeah. Right, because they just weren't in that world. So there is a resurgence, I think, of data sharing between like conventional guys right now, that I haven't seen really before.
15:32 Yeah Yeah, and I don't know if I'm just
15:36 in it, because I'm seeing it because I'm in it. Like when you buy a car, all of a sudden, you see everybody else that drives that car. Yeah, you see the same car, yeah. But I feel like there
15:43 are a lot of folks, for the last 10 years or 15 years, young engineers didn't want to get into conventional. No, there was no intersection. There was only hired into the shale booms, but now as
15:56 people get laid off and as things slow down, I see a lot of people coming back to it.
16:03 It's steady, it's a steady business. And you don't have to, it's not capital intense and nearly as much as, you know, every time you drill a well in the permit, what is it gonna run you?
16:14 Between 15 and 20 million? Yeah. To drill and complete, to bring that babble online? Yeah, if you don't know formation, you might be. High low? Yeah, eight, 10 per well. Yeah. Yeah. And
16:28 that's, depending on how all you got, everything really, really, really tight. Yeah Well, you can get wild, and I was just up in the Bakken, and
16:38 the interesting thing about the Bakken and the Powder Rivers, they're old formations, too. Mm-hmm. I mean, I giggled when I got up to North Dakota, but like the first time I went, almost 20
16:49 years ago, it seems, for oil and gas, right? And I did never pay attention to the old conventional business was up there. Yeah. That's been at oil field town, Will is in the middle of the
17:01 thirties, right? think out of river. Yeah, there's a ton. Yeah, a ton of that out there. And it's significant production every day. Yeah. I think there was a sexiness that the young engineers
17:16 saw in the show game because there was a lot of money thrown at it. Mm hmm. We threw a ton of money. We also, I think where they say we burned more money in the shell revolution than we made.
17:26 Yeah. Like we burned it. We lit up a lot of cash. Right. And we're good at it. Right. And I think that what happened was sexy was big, fast, bracket, 120 barrels a minute. This is going to
17:40 be fun and exciting. I'm at the Wild Wild West, it was. Yeah. But as things slow down, efficiencies go up, rig counts come down because of efficiencies, not just price of oil. Right. People
17:51 start like, where can I get steady at? Where can I get stable? Yeah. I don't know. Last time Hillcourt fired anybody. Right. Yeah. What year was that? They gave out100, 000 bonus. I still
18:02 think that goes on. Yeah, that's awesome. And so that's what I mean, like you don't hear merit. You don't hear heel quirk. I mean, I'm sure it happens. People get leg over, but I, you don't
18:13 hear these huge mass layoffs coming out of these larger conventional, you know, operator. Absolutely. Yeah, 'cause they've got that baseline. They've got that steady
18:27 Yeah, they've kind of got that game figured out.
18:32 But you need to define a large conventional operator. Like how?
18:42 To me, a large one would probably be a thousand well count, but probably a super would be 20, 000 well count up. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, and what in total production is that compared to a shale
18:51 operator? See, I think that's the wild difference, right? If you're operating up in, let's just say Farmington, New Mexico. you gotta have, you know, maybe 1, 000 wells in production to meet,
19:06 or 500 wells in production to meet one or two Ainsville. Yeah, yeah. And that's a lot of manpower. That's a lot of overhead. Eloise or high. That's a lot of maintenance. Like, it's hard. It's
19:22 hard to make the same kind of money. Yeah, absolutely, you gotta work for it. Which is why I don't think, I don't think gas is gonna go back to seven, eight, 10 in MZF for a long time because
19:34 we can drill it down so fast in the Haynesville and up in Pennsylvania, in the Marcellus, you know. I tend to believe the same. You know, we always forget about all that associated gas coming out
19:47 of the permit. And we've got all of that in Waja. Which, okay, I saw. I mean, they're giving this stuff away. I saw an article that they are putting pipeline heading west.
19:57 Yes. You're taking the California, you're on the Mexico I think, right? So if you look at like shipping time,
20:06 and now I get there's like regulatory problems with
20:11 California, but if you look at shipping time, it makes so much sense to put a fat-ass pipeline out to California and send it all to Asia. Run '18 and let it roll. Just run all that LNG over to -
20:25 Put it in the port of the Los Angeles and let it go And ship it out.
20:31 Everyone says this AI boom, so like, the blessing of being in Austin and some of our partners inside of our company are very big in that part of the tech world. Okay. I don't know if this AI
20:43 revolution is gonna push gas like the way everyone is, is theming, it's gonna push it. I think it's really just gonna be, yeah I mean we may have some stabilization three. Right. We may get
20:53 lucky if we get the four. Yeah. I mean that's a big if.
20:58 a stable three I think is probably where we're at for a while. Yeah, I think it works for everybody. There's a big enough differential between us and the European markets, right, to let US.
21:09 shippers and everybody make the money.
21:13 But I think you're absolutely right. Everybody thinks that we're going to see these big huge gas prices. I keep trying to find out, like, where?
21:21 Like everybody says, we're going to burn it for AI. No, I get that. I get that premise But we have a lot of gas, a lot of gas in our country, and we don't burn nearly what we produce. No, and
21:37 we're not, we're not tapping half of what we could be doing. No, you know, and like they started with some of those Haynesville, but now they're looking at like coming back into a bunch of a
21:49 bunch of this Cotton Valley stuff. Yes. Right. And the huge wells they're drilling, like, what else does it make? Alright, so I've just recently taken over a whale that had reservoir
22:02 calculations done to say this whale could drain 60 BCF. Bad ass whale cocks whale, right? Drilled in the 70s. In its life, it's cumed 23 BCF, okay? Still a good bit of reservoir there. Yeah,
22:18 oh yeah. It's got 2, 500 pounds on it. We've flow tested it for
22:24 48 hours at a little over a million MCF in a gained pressure as it was unloaded. Yeah, nice. Like this well is, it's a good well. For a conventional well, it's a great well. Very well. But
22:35 there's a number of these wells coming out of, like the Cotton Valley wells that are making 40 BCF in the first year. Yes, 40 in the first year. It's like, How do you, and you can see why
22:47 they're drilling them? How do you compete with that? And that's why I think every, that's why big money is there. But I think there's a big play, like you know, and the other thing that I'm
22:54 going to do is sit on a big, uh, they're big, huge. where they're from, up around college station, they cut all the way down into the little grange and getting these areas and they come down.
23:04 Like, I sit there and I'm like, man, that was a genius move to pick up all that acreage in that area. Not 'cause they're just what they're producing right now. But they can start cutting them bad
23:14 boys. So I don't know anybody over there. I don't know what they're doing. But I just sit back and I look and I'm like, Yo, these guys, it's a perfect little position to be in. Yeah, what's
23:23 that other one? It's not Wild Horse Wild Fire. Maybe it's Wild Fire is the current one. And they're doing horizontals up in that area. They're doing horizontals in that area and they're making
23:34 lots of oil and lots of gas. And just feeling it. Big wells, continental, what a continent. I think the probably the coolest thing going on right now is what continental is doing in the western
23:44 Barnett. What's that? They're going sideways out there and they've had huge wells. They've had wells bringing in a million barrels in just a month or two. Yeah. They got big wells. So I think
23:55 there's a whole lot, The unique thing about being a service company that works with a lot of conventional, we got a good start conventional. And now we're growing our learnings from conventional
24:06 into how we can service these big horizontals. I get to see inside the RD teams at these major operators, data sets, great engineers, PhDs walking around a lot going on. And ironically, it's not
24:22 much different than the conversations going on at the guy over here with 1, 000 conventional wells. I love it. It's, I mean, different in scale size, but when you boil all the water down, the
24:33 salt remains. It's the same conversations at the end. Yeah, all right. I didn't introduce you, whatever. People don't know if I read the title. They get it, that's what
24:47 they're doing.
24:49 Line me out. What are y'all doing? Like, all right, start with like the, I'm 10 years old. and then we'll dive off some rabbit holes. Okay, so C3 oil field services is just a break off that
25:03 idea that I had working at gas frack where we fracked oil wells of propane and butane. Okay. Well, the whole idea was how can we use these hydrocarbons, propane, butane condensates, wide grades
25:16 to re-enter the well, to do well world mediation and increase production? Okay. In doing so, one of the ideas became up with me and a partner of ours, Kevin Lang was, hey, what happens if we
25:28 add our own chemistry, like surfactants or wax crystal modifiers to a hydrocarbon based system? So now we're not just gonna treat like certain things like paraffin or use propane to lift gas,
25:40 liquid gas condensate, liquid loading. Like, hey man, we can do surfactants. Essentially be a production chemical company working in stimulation side. Yeah You can use the hydrocarbons.
25:57 like propane and butane as a delivery system for the chemicals instead of just bullheading them down or trying to get them to go in with water and causing all these other issues. That's right. Water
26:08 sensitivities, clay issues, some of the reservoirs, reservoir we're having a lot of fun in learning right now, the Vicksburg, South Texas, right? Everyone knows it, a little bit of oil out of
26:18 some of them. Major, major, major clay issues, right? You hit it with water and you can just assume your oil's done Well, they'd fracked all these wells. You see the high 6, 7 million a day,
26:29 and within 45 days, you're making200, 300 in the CF a day on these wells. But though you shut the well in and you've got 4, 000 or 5, 000 pounds on surface over two or three days, what's going
26:38 on? Yeah. Well, recently, we've been doing jobs where we're taking acid, we'll treat the downholed acid, then we'll go to straight into propane with the surfactant. So now the water that's
26:52 still bound in the reservoir or coneate water, break the acid. down the scale of the purpose. Push into the formation, actually treat in situ, pushing that surfactant in there. Now we're
27:03 actually falling into or dropping in diversion stages. Okay. Diverting and then just going to the next path of these resistance four or five times during a well. Nice. Major, major things we're
27:15 seeing, major unloading of wells, water rates go up, well head pressure, we got a well in some types of right now. Four times it's initial production before we got on the well, not IP production,
27:26 but where it was at and it's light when we just jumped on the well. Yeah. They can like 35, 45 MCF a day. We got the email this morning, she's 200 MCF a day and crank and still unloading, just
27:38 unloading water, things that you're just like, whoa, what's going on here? Yeah. So right now what C3 does is we use hydrocarbon base fluids to do well for remediation. In West Texas, we're
27:49 using drip gas and wax crystal modifiers and surfactants treat vertical sandanders with hyphenerics. Okay. And those wells pay in often six weeks, don't need a high to weather for eight months.
28:01 And you're cleaning up, you're not only cleaning up your tubulars, but you're cleaning up your near well bore. It is. And letting it flow through the rock. The whole thing is we even push past
28:12 the near well bore. We push into the reservoir. Gotcha. And I think that's where every other chemical companies are gonna try to get down to the bottom, you can drop soap stigs, do acid jobs.
28:23 It's all really near well bore For mediations, what they're focused on. We're focused on the damage, post perforations. Okay. What's going on back here, right? Phase trapping with waters.
28:35 What's going on in the rock. You can condense a banking. Many things, the more papers that we're seeing, we're starting to understand that, especially in West Texas and wells we did, the
28:45 reservoir temperature was colder than the wax precipitation temperature. So this isn't just wax on the reservoir.
28:55 Not even like here, but like way out. Yeah. Wax, right? I can see it. And so you take natural gasoline, you pump it down the reservoir form with some wax crystal modifier, get it deep enough
29:07 out there, all of a sudden that molecular structure is broken down by the solvent, right? Yeah. Your hydrocarbon. First contact miscible because of pressure. Yeah. Now that oil that had a wax
29:18 binding to it is released and soluble again, the wax crystal modifier keeps it from re, I guess re-stacking, re-coagulating, building up wax again. Yeah. Send it right through. And so you
29:32 actually, not just are you working on the well, you're actually loosening and freeing oil trapped down reservoirs of wax. Far out there. Yeah. It's an interesting thing, every well, we see so
29:46 many different type of well bore issues. Yeah. Skill, hair, fin, gas, liquid loading. And it's not that you have like any kind of like, particularly outstanding chemical that you built, but
30:04 it's this idea of like a hydrocarbon delivery that gets it far enough into the reservoir to actually do some good. So like our surfactants, right? So what we built on our surfactant was a
30:18 surfactant, not a mall so far with the de-foamers, so it's a package surfactant. Okay. The reason why is when you pump propane in the ground, if you start lifting, as that liquid propane gases
30:26 out, you get a lot of vapors and gases, you can build an emulsion, as you know, productions in facilities hate emulsion. Yeah. So we built these certain chemistries, but what's interesting
30:34 about the chemistries, it favors water, okay? So the minute that surfactant gets nearer in the presence of the water molecule, it partitions to the water, right? So the idea was how do you build
30:47 a chemistry that's also not de-gridated by a solvent, right? see most chemistries if you make with the solvent, depending on the type of chemistry, it's going to break it down. Yeah. You're
30:58 going to remember the chemistry useless. So how do you get the right chemistry to not be killed? So we actually spent a lot of time building wax crystal modifiers, soluble in a hydrocarbon and
31:11 whatnot, surfactants, corrosion inhibitors, things like that. So we just keep building into it. Yeah. Yeah. A little different. I'm going to turn these states. Oh, yeah. You're good Yeah.
31:23 Part of the reason we're out here and I wanted to do this podcast with you out here is because I've got a well out here that I want you to work on.
31:32 Yeah. And what I believe the issue to be with the well
31:39 is that they came in.
31:43 They weren't making, I don't know why they started to work over on this well. Maybe they weren't making as much fluid as they thought they wanted to
31:52 history of the world was still doing well. All right, making eight to 10 barrels a day of oil. Not about oil. At 4, 400 feet.
32:02 Easy. Doing its thing, right? They came in, pulled tubing, they tagged a tight spot in casing, they moved up a little bit, shot some perps into an additional show, 10 or 12 feet above the
32:18 original show, but left the original show open, and set a gravel pack, okay? Try to handle any sand. They put this, you know, Mitchell Industries out of Louisiana. There's not many people at
32:32 gravel pack. No. You know, conventional wells. And as like a tool hand, the guys that run gravel packs are like, normally some of the smartest tool hands out there, right?
32:44 So there's this, they come up over and over and over again here in South Texas, I've picked up some of these old wells. If there's a gravel pack in it, It's probably Mitchell Industries out of
32:53 Louisiana. Yeah. Right. I like that. Not affiliated in any way. It's probably a Mitchell gravel pack. So anyways, Mitchell comes out, does this gravel pack?
33:05 Little to no note of it in the
33:10 daily reports. But track down the company man that was on the job.
33:16 And the tool hand that was on the job. And got to talking to them and they pumped a load of fresh water You know, the
33:25 production never returned on this well. It pumps off in like, does not even casing volume. It'll pressure up to like 600 psi, 700 psi. It'll pump off in like two barrels. Yeah, and then dead.
33:40 Dead, no fluid, no pressure. How much water did they get back out of it? And flow. Put that water on there. Not a whole lot, like 35 barrels, maybe. 20, 25 So the reason we're out here is
33:53 'cause like. this well, I think, by then putting either an uninhibited or a poorly inhibited fresh water, they swelled any clays in that formation. Yeah. And now we've got a huge inflow problem.
34:09 So I will tell you some things that I'm seeing. Our company, at this point in time, pumps zero water at all on any job for any operator. And the reason why is because we've seen more and more
34:21 water damage across the board with people are not paying attention to what's going on in the rock. The rock should dictate fluid. Now, we use water because it's cheap, and I get all that,
34:33 especially in the big fracks. However, we did some jobs the other way of the day down South Texas. And we told the operator, hey, we don't pump water. We're not going to do it. Oh, please,
34:43 please just load the back side on these wells first with water so that while you're pumping, we make sure that we don't have no blowout on the tubing or whatnot if you get a little pressure. So the
34:52 one time that I was like, you know what? Okay, we'll do that for you. Well, we start pumping, we do all of our charts, we figure out we need X amount of barrels to load the backside, we rig in,
35:01 boys on the backside, and we start pumping. Like, all right, 20 barrels in, this thing should start building pressure. 30 barrels in, where's the pressure? We know 60 barrels is our, is our
35:13 fool, where's the pressure, right? Well, never caught pressure, we got 60 barrels in. We kill it, like, hey, buckly, we got charts on both sides. You don't see a lot of pressure going up on
35:25 the 2B, right? Okay. Well, we're like, all right, we'll leave it shut in, we'll be coming to the job tomorrow, but we got everything ready. Backside's loaded, you know, at least we got
35:33 fluid on the backside. Well, we come back in the next day, that backside was empty, right? And so, we just dropped 60 barrels of water with KCL, 53, I think it was, or 5. With KCL and
35:48 everything on the way So, with KCL, for people that don't know. If you have clays and they're gonna be sensitive to water, the most expensive way is to actually run a true KCL. Yes. But it's the
36:01 most sure fire that you're not gonna swell your clays. That's right, that's absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. At least have a better control of not damaging them to the maximum extent of what damage could
36:12 be. Yeah. Would be a way, I would say. And so we get on the well, we pump, we do our job the next day, like, all right, we're doing it Well, it took the well
36:24 with a swab rig, four days with a swab rig to get back, right? Well, the other well is that no water on them, even if they had holes in the tubing, come back immediate, right? And what we've
36:37 learned in that, you drug any water on them, it kills them. Yeah. And we did a well in, over and around the Eagle Pass, where we did a propane job for them, well and loaded came back great Some
36:49 guys wanted to do an acid job next to us, kind of comparative. water on the wheel and I was like, Hey, y'all gonna worry about that? Oh, this reservoir doesn't matter about water. Okay, well,
36:59 it's got high paraffin, you're gonna send a cold water down on it.
37:03 Is anybody thought about that? And, you know, they looked at you like, You're crazy. But it's like, Have you ever stuck your finger in a candle? Yeah. It's cold. It coagulates. Yes, yes.
37:17 And so, four wells in a row of the keel, and then they call us up saying, Hey, man, um, anyway, you guys can come over here and see if, and water, water I would be willing to bet is a big
37:28 damage mechanism, especially if you have a lot of paraffin in the well. A whole lot more than people realize. Oh, much more. A whole lot more than people realize. And even if it's, it's common
37:37 for us to put field saltwater back into the well. Yes. Water that's come out of the well. It's much easier Much better. We typically put back in. Yeah.
37:48 Especially conic water, right? Yeah. If you know for sure it's actual conic, not even like a, a freshman. rack or whatnot. Yeah, but Conan water is no problem going back because it is, it is,
37:58 you know, already compatible with the rock. Yeah, exactly. It came out of the rock. That's right. You put it back on the rock. It's it shouldn't shouldn't alter the process. That's right.
38:06 That's right.
38:08 Yeah. But I think water is a bigger. So when you look at like a lot of these shell plates and you start wondering what, why is it you have these massive IPs? Yeah. And these major drops. But
38:18 yeah, you have this massive communication to a reservoir, right? Yeah. Well, I, I, our company spent a lot of time looking at clay content in one of these shells. Well, if you're working in
38:30 nano darcy perm, and you have 2 or 1 smectite
38:35 or a clay swelling clay doesn't take much. Well, doesn't take much. That's really interesting. So when you look at it, and then you go back and say, all right, how much water, how much real
38:49 are we recovering from these frats and these detours on a weld? average operator is going to tell you we get about 30 back if we're lucky you may meet an operator oh we're getting 50 50 no one gets
38:59 it all yeah but the water cut a many times stays the same but if you analyze the water yeah you'll see the shift from the frack water come back to the coning yeah and what you're saying is you're
39:10 leaving a lot of water down home now where is that water yeah I'm gonna go on a tangent real quick to educate some people
39:19 because I've been going down this rabbit hole lately trying to understand clay it's not all created equal no right not all correct clays are created equal the two we worry
39:32 about smectite and illite yes right are typically like pretty well linked and then you have smectite that I mean you get the words wrong here there's some smectite that's like
39:45 ionized in a way that it does not react with water but But there's some smectite that like
39:53 Water is
39:55 typically negatively charged. Is it negatively charged or positively charged? It has a charge. That's why water beads up. Yeah, I think it's negative when the twice stays off. Yeah, it's
40:04 negatively charged, it stays together. So if you have smectite
40:09 that maybe is positively charged and then this water ion comes in and it's negatively charged, it bonds to that smectite and thus the swelling, right? Now that they're bonded together, that
40:22 molecule is now twice the size. So when we're talking about like nano-darcie perm, like -
40:30 Neutral, water's neutral. I just checked. Fluent neutral? We add KCL to change it. It doesn't have like a natural negative ionization.
40:42 This is just AI.
40:46 Tell me about it. We're just asking the AI here, however these particles chance balance out,
40:52 in a net charge of zero for the molecule. Okay, interesting. Well - There may be something there deeper than Groke wants to say. Somebody write in that's smarter than us and fix this for me. But,
41:06 those look good. I'm gonna have to grab a plate. We're gonna have to pause this and we're gonna come back to our chemistry lesson. Will you help with anything? I'm just gonna grab a plate from
41:14 inside,
41:21 Oh shit, that looks good
41:33 You need help with anything? Nah. You got a pocket knife on you? No, I don't. I'm in a rental.
41:40 My truck's got everything. I got four Z pocket knives and everything else. This is a pretty decent knife. Oh, you got plates? Yeah. That one worked for you. You got a knife on you? Yeah
42:08 Dude, you're in a rental. I hate that. I hate not being in my truck. I have so many tools in my truck that like I don't even think about that they're there until I go to use them. I'm like, oh,
42:19 I really need a XYZ and it's just there. My truck's got half my life
42:26 on our world. You're learning to live out of it Yeah, no, you 100 do. You're on location so much at the time.
42:36 Looks like.
42:38 I don't know. I like being out in the field though. I do that every day versus fucking being an officer. Appreciate it, man. That looks good as shit
43:02 It is a nice night out here, man. It's always nice out here. I don't know why this place just, like hot days have a really cool evening set here.
43:13 Man, this is the time of the night where I like working the most. Like I gotta be out working. Like I'll call it quits from three to six. Yeah. That's where the Siesta came from. You know that?
43:22 Oh yeah, oh absolutely. 'Cause it's hot. It's like the Mexican boys had it figured out. Dude, everybody gives me little shit 'cause I like taking naps. Yeah John D. Rockefeller took one every
43:32 day 'cause the richest man on the planet. So, you know what I mean, why, why? I think if Rockefeller did it, it's gotta be good. I mean, there was something going on there.
43:44 That boy knew something we didn't know.
43:48 You figured a lot of shit out, didn't you? Yeah, I got one I'm good here. Cool. I'm gonna set this around back.
43:55 Okay, so we need to grab a little extra. Yeah, I set it right over here
44:02 That's money in the bank, dog. Mm-hmm.
44:08 We'll do a little fast and furious style prayer. Got it. You with me? Yep, go ahead. All right, dear Lord, thank you for Mud Motors and Tricone Bitts and Frank Fletz. And no, but thank you
44:20 for this time to spend together. And the blessing of the knowledge that we share just through fellowship with the brothers in Christ, Lord I was asked that you keep us safe and to help us carry on
44:32 your word and your vision for what you have us do in our life to help glorify you, Lord. Bless this food to keep us healthy and go live a life that praises you and glorifies you and teach others
44:47 about your word and your glory. So you're going to be pregnant.
44:52 Money. All right. We're back. So I'm going to let you get back to it as I eat Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't remember what I was saying. about clays and stuff yeah yeah so I was just I
45:04 was just breaking out a kind of smectite that we have we have smectite no light some smectites are highly reactive I think would be the right word yes to a fluid
45:16 and I'll have on the next episode hopefully somebody will have written in and told me where and why we were wrong on positive or negative or why it why some react and some don't but I've just recently
45:32 started down this rabbit hole good edible highly edible good I'll jump in here in a second
45:39 so anyways yeah well we're particularly when we're looking at clays we're looking for smectite
45:46 as our problem child
45:50 because it reacts with water and we try to combat that with stuff like stuff like KCL pump and KCL that normally helps but that's a really interesting idea that we're already in at Nano Darcy world,
46:03 we're already in,
46:06 there's Darcy's.
46:10 I'm gonna have to Google this real quick. Maybe you can Google for me. Like Saudi guar field,
46:19 permeability of Saudi guar, like one of the most prolific, easy to move fluid through fields
46:28 has what, it probably might have a full Darcy
46:34 But then like most of the stuff we deal with, we're talking about micro Darcy's,
46:42 right? So like I'm looking at
46:47 200, 300, 400
46:52 would be a good permeability for me to be able to move fluid through, right? We have a porosity, which is a percent, which is about how much fluid we can hold. formation. Then we have a
47:03 permeability, which is how much fluid we can move through a formation. When guar field is 10 milli-darsi. 10. 10 to 1, 000 milli-darsi.
47:17 So it might be up to a Darcy. A thousand milli-darsi, right? It might be up to a Darcy. Hold on. So guar might be up to
47:34 a Darcy. Yes. Then we have milli-darsis. Then I think we have micro-darsis and then we have nanodarsis. Is micro-darsi between or do we move from milli-darsi to nanodarsi? I don't know. Yeah.
47:37 Somebody's going to correct. Shale is a nanodarsi. Nanodarsi. Like I was talking to an engineer at XTO in North Dakota and he was telling me at the kind of darsis they have in the Bakken shale,
47:58 like truly in the Bakken shale itself. Mm-hmm, this is good. You will move a hydrocarbon molecule less than a millimeter in a hundred years at full pressure depletion. As much pressure as you can
48:18 pull off of that whale, you will only move that hydrocarbon a millimeter. Because the poor space, the poor throat size is so small, you're trying to cram this huge hydrocarbon through there. It's
48:33 just not going to move that fast. It's so big, it takes so much energy to get it through. And so that's where
48:40 EOR enhanced oil recovery is a really hard topic in a true shale formation. Absolutely. Right? And so we look at a lot of things and we think about them as unconventional, but not all of them are
48:52 shale, right? Like Eagleford is a limestone. Yes, yes It's a limestone that we're trying to move things. through, we call it the shale revolution. It is a self-sourcing rock, right? The TOC
49:08 was there, the oil was generated in the Eagle Ford, but it's not a true shale. When we look at like the Bakken, it's a true shale. And you just can't cram that big old fat hydrocarbon through
49:23 such a small opening
49:27 Yeah, exactly. So our fraction sand props open all these little things so that
49:34 we can get oil through some areas. But
49:38 I think the efficiency of that may be within tens of hundreds of foot, not, it's not like it's going out very, very far. We're saying placements, not, and then you sort of ask me, what is the
49:50 efficiency of that frag length on top of it? There's all these little globules that aren't fractured in any way, shape or form, because we have these big fracks that take, and I think Collide even
49:59 had a. Discussion today on looking at frack efficiency. They have one today while we're recording this day. Oh, wow. Awesome. They had a power hour on Slickwater fracks and frack efficiency.
50:12 How big are those fracklings? How much rock are we really touching? Probably not. Probably not that much. And then you think how big they've got on these fracks. Yeah, huge. You're pumping
50:24 cities of sand. Yeah You know, well, it's only a few inches big. Yeah, so I think you're on like when you start thinking nano darcy in these shells, right? So if you already have that much
50:37 issue moving the hydrocarbon molecule, which is half the size of water. Yeah Yeah, I mean, I know propane and butane are about half the size of water for sure. Yeah If you're having that much
50:46 issue getting the smaller molecule through what happens when you self-induce it with high pressure and force that water molecule through to where you already weren't going to get the The oil or gas to
50:57 migrate through so the question I had for you where I think where I was getting to with that real long about spiel
51:07 Explained to be missable. Hmm
51:11 So I guess the easiest way to say it would be like if you took paint One like five gallon the five gallon bucket of paint easy wave mental model for me to give people understand it and I take a gallon
51:27 Of paint thinner. Mm-hmm. I can put the paint thinner in the in the the paint stir it up Making it equal all throughout it. I still get the same color of paint It's still paint It's a little bit
51:40 less viscous Right, okay, so what miss ability is being able to take two fluids That I like that I like but this similar, uh-huh and through either Enforcement of together a stirring reaction or
51:55 pressure like we use down hole miss ability through pressure You actually get something to become a new fluid together Okay.
52:03 So, we pump a lot of propane on an oil oil oil if it has a gas sales line, because propane is cheap, highly favors. It wants to be with the heavy oil. It wants to be a part of it. It does, okay.
52:15 And then when we give it the pressure, it needs to be able to join and become a new fluid, right, which is the frat pump or gravity, whatever's feeding down whole, you get above that visibility
52:26 pressure and on propane, the visibility pressures around three to 400 pounds. So you don't need a lot of pressure on the surface to make that propane join that
52:37 oil molecule. What happens when it joins it, it swells it. So if you can think about that molecule on the rock, it's sitting across the rock, well all of a sudden it has a lot of surface tension
52:47 'cause more of the area is on the rock. Well, if you get that propane on there, that molecule of that oil now swells, decreasing its surface tension, right, because it's giving it less surface
52:59 area contact, And now let's be more mobile, right? Makes it thinner, makes it easier to pump, less viscous. So as a flow back of that oil, it becomes a much
53:12 easier molecule now to flow back. So we could take like
53:17 in the Navarro, the Taylor, depending on where you are in Texas.
53:24 I've got like a 30 degree API. OK. OK
53:30 So if we were to - and I sell that barrel for right now, WTI65 a barrel today, I typically get about65 a
53:39 barrel for that oil, right?
53:42 People that don't know different grades of oil. In different prices? Yeah, we say oil price is X. But like, one of my wells might have a10 deduct because it's just really shitty oil and high
53:53 sulfur and whatever it may be. And I might have a really sweet oil over here And it gets a certain barrel that a particular - company wants to make their tennis shoes out of, whatever it may be, it
54:04 might get a2 bump, okay? Same as gas. Gas, same way. Yep, we want particular kinds of this product for different markets.
54:16 So, this 30 degree API oil that gets right at WTI, 60 final edge barrel. What I'm understanding is that I can pump propane, but you can obtain something of the like a very, like a very small C
54:35 chain, like a C3 or C4, right? And typically condensate doesn't get very good prices. No. These are low C
54:40 chains.
54:44 We don't get very good prices as a liquid when we try to sell them. That's right. So, I could buy this propane at maybe25 or30 barrel. Even cheaper right now, we're delivering it Yeah, you're
54:56 probably close. We're delivering it a dollar. It's all been delivering dollar every day. dollar a gallon so forty two forty two dollars barrel yep okay and I pump it into my formation
55:10 and then when I go to flow it back because it was super critical when I pumped it yep and now it's mixed with my formation mixed with my oil in my formation
55:24 and I go to flow it back and we have this pressure drop I've now added energy yep because it's going to come out of a super critical state it's going to go to a gaseous state whatever it isn't
55:34 missable in the oil whatever didn't get fully missable in the oil is going to separate to gas and give you lift so I've added pressure to my formation I've added drive to my formation and I've added
55:43 volume of something that now when it mixes in my oil instead of being a 60 degree and a 30 degree I'm flowing back maybe a 42 degree yes oil yep they could be highly favored yes I'm getting some I'm
56:00 moving it easier through the rock, it's boosting my production. Absolutely. So like some of our operators we're working with, they have their own, their producing oil. And associated gas, with
56:12 that gas is wet, coming out of oil wells, right? Well, they may make 200 barrels a week of, what we would consider condensate slash natural gasoline, drip gas for production guys
56:27 Well that, they're selling that retail sometimes, you know, half WTI, or even a third, of what WTI's trading for. So maybe 20 bucks a barrel for it. So we have guys that, they own the field,
56:40 we take that
56:42 condensate, white grade, re-inject it back into their wells, because the value of it is worth more if we get it back down to contact every oil, you now take that20 barrel, blended in with a60
56:57 barrel and now you've got two60 barrel.
57:01 Instead of using the tanks that you see a lot of the traders on on surface They they got a by trash oil and then blend in Well, there's it's really only what you blend is your max output, right?
57:13 Well with one of one of the barrels that we take on surface can contact three barrels down whole Now you took one barrel and you've actually produced four sixty dollar barrels With that one twenty
57:25 dollar barrel Yeah, so it's a way that you can actually Take the lower-valued product you're producing reintroduce it into the field again and actually through simple physics Turn that twenty dollar
57:39 barrel into an EOR fluid and increase its value when it comes up on the other side Why are we not doing this at my field in Lavernea?
57:51 Gotta do a lot of work to go at it right now Gotta look at it again. Oh, but I mean that's a that's a lot of what we're doing. That's great And so the cool thing with C3 is, you know, we have
58:01 some patents around adding surfactants to the fluids for EOR, but Lindy, the major gas company, Lindy Gases, a commercial gases, they have some really important patents around EOR and using
58:18 vibrating condensate. Really? Well, through one of our sister companies that I'm also partnered in with, we've been able to get our access to those Lindy patents. So as of right now, we're the
58:32 only pumping company in North America that has access to pump these fluids for EOR without worry of being sued by a major international gas company. So it's kind of some of the other things we've
58:45 done on our side. I would say separates us as a service company. Yeah. You can't just go down the street and start pumping this. Yeah. Well, the worry of some guys with a lot of money IP, which
58:56 is crazy, but. because this is what we were doing in the conventional world,
59:02 the '20s and '30s and '40s. Yeah.
59:06 The only thing that separated my company was we decided to put chemistry with it. Gotcha. So people asked a lot of time, how did you get a patent around public propane? We've been doing this since
59:14 the '40s. Absolutely true.
59:18 But they didn't have our technology around chemicals. They didn't understand surfactants and those things like that. They were playing with them. Don soap was a big one back in the old days. Yeah
59:28 But they never went for it like this. So we did different than everyone else had ever done. I said, let's actually build production chemistry around this type of delivery mechanism. Hey, but
59:36 don't hate on the Don soap. Either too. No, it works. I'm not still using it. I've got to do a set of funnel in his casing and buy a pallet of Don soap and Costco. The one gallon one, Joe. And
59:48 just chugged that down there for however long. I got a better one for you. I know it. So much that it hit the tanks. Like, you look at the tanks are bubbling. I got a buddy of mine. I got sick
1:00:00 and tired of paying former prices, right? He's like, I'm fucking sick of this. So what did he do? He went down to Costco to the same thing. He took the chemistry off the chemical injection pump
1:00:10 water down Don Soap to the same biscuits and he's just pumping Don Soap down the wall. Foming it up on a cap string. You're the cap string to drop Don Soap down the bottom as well, and it works.
1:00:23 It's eco-friendly. You can't get mad Look at that. I'm selling a little bit of the oil, you know, making the oil a little slide back. I've seen some wild stuff.
1:00:33 Not all bad stuff. Yeah, if it works, it's not crazy. I
1:00:40 mean, you're just doing liquid soap sticks. It's essentially all you're doing. I mean, you look at the composite of what's all on a soap stick. It's not much different than Don Soap. Yeah. Yeah.
1:00:52 That's a dishing thought, too
1:00:55 Yes, are you currently operating any wells?
1:00:59 I'm involved in
1:01:04 a couple joint ventures. Gotcha. And that's really where like not joint ventures. That's where we've done a lot of our stuff at right now.
1:01:09 I am moving into assets, but with the service company really kind of taking off and exploding right now in many ways. Yeah. It gets really, really, really hard to go chase wells when you got
1:01:21 people knocking on your door and say, Hey, come work on my well. Trying to get you to. You're probably in the same position So. Man, I'm gonna tell you what, you cooked these steaks perfect,
1:01:31 man. Thank you. I was worried I was gonna get distracted, good Yeah. 'em about forget just can We.. So
1:01:41 it's been an interesting ride for us, really because EOR is becoming such a big deal. Mm-hmm.
1:01:50 You know, the Huff and Puff was a big deal for a while for, and the Eagle for EOG was doing that big high pressure compression. Yep What we've kind of done is been able to take that. cost of doing
1:01:59 that same type of treatment
1:02:02 and just drive it in the ground um that's kind of what has brought us into the Bakken is our our ability to be really safe managing large amounts of volume and product on on location under pressure
1:02:17 with rate on it and we've been able to make a good little cutout for ourselves in doing this I don't know if I know anyone else kind of doing the type of work C3 is doing these days gotcha
1:02:30 yeah it is really interesting
1:02:35 we got to figure out what to do with these lower-cost fluids we have a lot of things that we can put into a well but not all of them are the best option mm-hmm you know and if you're looking at a well
1:02:45 and you're like hey I got a good well how do I not want to damage it some of the work we're doing with a major operator in South Texas. Our treatment didn't change so much the different of the
1:02:55 outcome of doing it the natural way ie.
1:02:59 We were doing the same acid jobs, using the same type of acid, same kind of diverter. The difference is, the job comes in about 80, 000 less than they were naturally doing, between 30 and 80,
1:03:13 depending on the well. And they were like,
1:03:17 in my head, I was kind of like, well, what are you all interested in using us? We're a little bit more expensive than your aggressive guys will. When they broke out the fact that on the up and up,
1:03:25 we're the same price as the daily rate, minus the fact that our flu that we pump in, more valuable, higher commodity price, would you get it right back? The flu is right back to you. Right. So
1:03:35 I said, what is the value incentive you guys are seeing with our tech? And they said the fact that every time we use you, we know for 100 there's not a swab rig or a workover rig needed behind you.
1:03:49 Nice. I never thought about the cost of, as you know, hey, we go hit a well, you put water on or ask a job, you may have to bring a job. out to to swab on it for three or four days. We have
1:04:02 four or five, six thousand dollars a day. Yeah. And being somebody that never operated in the conventional space that well before one of my big learnings has been
1:04:14 not just do you have to focus on the service that you're providing but what is the impact that they have to deal with the operator has to deal with those service. Right. Right. And for and most
1:04:23 people just saying, Hey man, I'm gonna go do an acid job. We're gonna put some water on the wells and acid. Yeah. And that's what we do every day, all day, every day. But once that service
1:04:32 company gets off the well, they're not worried about the swabwood bill. Yeah. They've got their money, they're not worried about it. All the, all the ancillary services. The company man to
1:04:41 watch the swab rig. Yes. The extra tank out there to take the pressure because they don't want to blow it to the tank. Yeah, or the compressor is going to swamp out like there's all this other
1:04:53 layout that it is interesting going from service to operator. And now, you know, playing company man for a while for a number of different operators, like seeing
1:05:05 kind of the mindset of what the, there's like the job, and then there's the spread. Yes, you have to be able to look at the whole spread. All this stuff that's incorporated. You know, and
1:05:16 that's one of the things like I never thought about like, so this operator now, it's a pretty big major that we're working with, and their whole driving force was like, hey, you guys have a great
1:05:26 tech, but though you guys see this, here's what we've seen. So one thing I keep learning about our own, I mean, idea that came out of our heads on a back seat of a truck, right, that has turned
1:05:37 into this company now that's given a lot of his opportunity has been, we have yet to fully see all the intricacies in which this has been helpful for operators. Mm-hmm. We've been doing these
1:05:47 treatments, gaining more treatments, doing more work, and it wasn't until two weeks ago that a big major operator goes, Dude, you know what, your cost is so cheap And we're like, what are you
1:05:57 talking about? We're trying to keep our costs low so that we can, you know, we want to be competitive against the regular guy doing the same style of work. And he's like, Hey man, you haven't
1:06:08 added on that. We put in four to six days of swab after every job. And I'm like, time out? Yeah, that's four to four thousand a day, not including the consultant to be out there and all the,
1:06:21 whatever comes with it. And they're like, yeah, it costs us about 20 to30, 000 to swab well And if we have a big problem, we may be out there for 10 days, and it could be a60, 000 to80, 000
1:06:32 issue for us. And so as a service guy, I think one of the guys that, you know, South Texas guys like you and
1:06:40 I, we at least have a couple of good people to look up to in that world. Rod Lewis, I think, is one that guys like us, you just take the story alone. Pumper started off as a pumper saw some
1:06:53 whales, saw who didn't work.
1:06:56 I can do it a little bit better. Let me go mortgage my house. Let me go grab some wells. And then next thing you know is like, as anybody in South Texas knows, you can't move without Rod Lewis,
1:07:08 hearing the name Rod Lewis in the oil business. I think there's a part, and you know, go look at Harold Hamm, you know. There's something about guys that come from the service side, that move
1:07:18 into operating, that I think have a different perspective than the guys that go straight into operating The more time on the well, you get, that's where all the education is. You can't learn that
1:07:32 shit sitting in the office somewhere and somebody reporting back to you at the day did. You only get the bullet points. You don't get the, from sitting in the office, you don't get the, hey,
1:07:42 this happened. Here was the thought process behind, and here's the things we had at Earls, we had to jump through, you just got the outcome was resolved. Right, right. And being in the field,
1:07:51 when you get there, then when you become the operator, you're like, oh, I've been here before. We can we can skip the bull's you know that guy is pissed off at the end of the day because he had
1:07:60 to x y and z Absolutely, and so yeah I do think there's something for like guys our age and generation that are coming into it getting started in the conventional game Mm-hmm because that's and you
1:08:12 can learn a lot and you can get a lot of big wins Then you look at guys like Hill Corp, and he'll be running what they've done You know you you look it's an interesting thing to do if I was I'm not a
1:08:21 geologist But if I was a geologist every time Hill Corp made another acquisition Mm-hmm. I would be interested in the formation below the producing interval a body Right below it or near it or yeah,
1:08:35 like you go look at the San Juan's up there. Mm-hmm. There's a huge show place in underneath the San Juan's
1:08:42 So was a little rain just buying vertical gas woes Right, right. It's so there's or is he holding deep rights? I mean, you started learning that, right? Unless you're out here in the field.
1:08:55 doing this right, you don't get to learn that. You don't get to see like, hey man, how are these big boys playing the game? 'Cause there is some guys playing smart, and I think I look at
1:09:07 LinkedIn a lot of the time, and I see a lot of guys that are like, man, we're doing this, we're doing that.
1:09:13 I'm actually more impressed by the guys that like, don't say nothing. 'Cause that's one thing that's kind of cool about our business too. There's a lot of guys walking around doing cool stuff And
1:09:25 it's not that they don't want to talk about it. They don't know how to. Oh. You know what I mean? There's nobody like you coming and talking to me like, Yo man, what are you guys up to today?
1:09:34 No, there's a lot of stuff I want to talk about that my geologist would beat me over the head if I said, I probably say too much as it is. But I get so excited about it. It's fun. And you talk
1:09:46 about, like earlier, we talked about like data sharing, right? There are a lot of things that are no longer
1:09:56 It's not necessarily it's a competitive advantage. Like sharing the data doesn't, you don't lose your competitive advantage by sharing the data with a lot of these fields, right? It just raises
1:10:09 everybody up to share the data. There are a couple of things going on out there and plays going on out there that
1:10:20 you don't want to be too loud about 'cause somebody else is gonna beat you to the punch and you'll lose your opportunity. Those are hard for me. Yes. I'm working on three of them right now. And
1:10:31 keeping them underneath the belt and not talking about it. And I love to throw ideas around and so like it's hard for me not. Oh yeah. Because you might know something. Oh yeah. About this exact
1:10:42 formation that I'm tinkering with. Yeah. And unless we talk about it, I'm not gonna know what you know and when I start talking about it. Then I. But it's gonna start looking at it. And then
1:10:51 someone else knows, right?
1:10:57 That's what's fun. And I do think that data sharing is like, so here's what I think there is a competitive, where I think there's competitive advantage, is when you have guys that are together
1:11:03 working on something, once they figure it out together as a team, then they lock up, right? Now they're gonna run as far as they can in the field until other operators. Start taking it out.
1:11:15 Figuring it out, right? And so that's what I think, I think there is a place for competitive advantage, but it's those willing to take some crazy risks right now Like, there are some people out
1:11:25 there doing some really, I mean, a good one for people is like black brush, like they're doing some really cool stuff. You don't know what they're doing 'til they plug a bunch of paper, all right?
1:11:35 Unless you know truck drivers, you know what I mean? Like, you know the truck drivers, you learn a lot. But when you start looking at it like, why would a company like black brush be on the
1:11:44 forefront of doing what these majors are not are failing to do? Yeah. And then you're like, these guys know the game, the next game. The next game is going to be not how it gets to the most off
1:11:55 the drill. It's who figures out the next step of technology to move is from first round of production and recovery to our ultimate in recovery, right? And so there's some cool stuff going on out
1:12:08 there. I just don't know if enough people are giving certain people opportunities to talk about it. You know what I mean? I know some guys that are
1:12:19 doing some wild stuff up in Pine Del Y only right now, the Jonah field. Really? Oh, I mean, that's 1 of the nation's gas every day. Yeah. You forget about that. Yeah. I mean, if you were the
1:12:29 operator with 1 of America's gas every day, it doesn't take a little bit of - That's not even consequential. Not at all. And if you can just tweak all that half a point, bring each one of those
1:12:41 wells up 2 or 3. You don't need 500, 600 MCF a day from 30 or 100 all you need is 130 or 30 MCF will to go to 100. Yeah. And overnight you got three percent of the nation's gas. Yeah. So I think
1:12:57 there's an interesting thing going on where there's a lot of like cool shit going on out here. Right.
1:13:05 But I do also would tell you that I think South Texas, if you're a young dude and you're gonna try to go beat the machine, I don't think you could beat it anywhere else easier than in South Texas
1:13:14 and right. It's south and west Texas. Yeah. West, if you play the horizontal game, you're done before you even walked in the room. Yeah It's the money. The money is right. But I mean a young
1:13:26 man right now that could find a good four or five wells. Yeah. Right, figure out what was wrong with them. You pick them up for the right price. Maybe do a deal, like you do a lot of the time
1:13:34 talking to the old royalty owners, the well board's there. Like hey, let's just do a little bit of TLC and you got a good well. Yeah. You get four or five of them lined up. Yeah. You can raise
1:13:46 money now, right? And once you can raise money.
1:13:52 between the ditches you can actually build and I mean he'll do a brand didn't start out with massive you know he wasn't buying Conoco and Exxon Day one right you know and you look at Rod Lewis did the
1:14:04 same thing it was just small piece it together yeah slow and steady and my favorite guy to think about is I tell a lot of the guys that come from service is Harold Ham yeah Harold Ham was a driller
1:14:16 yeah I think his very first business he started was a hot either is that right driver truck or something I think it was a being a hot other guy 17 years old I think a 17 or 19 to buy this first or the
1:14:28 hot order yeah yeah like that's why I would say that booked the freckers Internet I think when you get to hear the the where it started right we're like yeah Harold Ham is a poor guy in Oklahoma
1:14:38 figuring out like the I think he was the youngest of like five or six kids you know right now that dude walks around and damn your own snorty coat and Oklahoma you know what I mean like any And you
1:14:48 don't get there and I don't think you had ever had a Harold Ham without the service. I don't think get Rod Lewis without
1:14:55 going out there being a pumper. Yeah, yeah, you've got to understand, you've got to understand the basics and the mechanics of it. Like no matter how big you get as a CEO,
1:15:08 like the numbers on a page, or just numbers on a page at some point, and with the oil field in particular, you've got to understand some portion of the operations. And the guys that always get
1:15:24 beat. Like you see, like none of the guys that I'm working with right now that are private, it's interesting. The guys have been in the game a long time. These dudes made smart, meticulous
1:15:37 thought through. Don't have 10, 000 data sets. Don't do any of that, but it's life and what they've done their whole life. You go meet the guys that I'm working with on stuff up in the bopping
1:15:50 and whatnot,
1:15:52 This is what we started two months ago, two years ago. This is what we're on. We need data point on everything before we make a step forward. And that step could be a quarter step. We can't even
1:16:01 do everything is data driven. I'm gonna go on a little rant for you. For people. Excuse me if you know who you are. And I'm talking about it right now, but all right, I'm paying on the service
1:16:15 side.
1:16:16 Since
1:16:19 I sold on the service side for 15 years, right? Since being an operator.
1:16:26 And people trying to sell me on some of their stuff. And here lately in particular, I've been like, I'm gonna entertain some of these conversations. I don't know if I can afford them or I
1:16:35 necessarily need it, but I'm thinking about it. I'm gonna entertain some of these conversations. You should. You know what annoys me more than anything? Like, I've only got so much time. When
1:16:47 they wanna do like a four step sales process Introduction, it's one meeting. A quantification is a second meeting. A qualification is a third meeting. And then figuring out how we can, what we
1:17:07 can add to you, the fourth meeting and getting. I'm like, dude. If we're gonna do it every other day. 45 minutes, 45 minutes. Tell me what you can do, what you can provide. I'll tell you if I
1:17:16 think that's good and I can afford it. Like get the shit over with Yeah, yeah. For you sales guys out there, like I don't have time to take five meetings over the next three weeks. Yep. Can you
1:17:30 get me what I need? I love what you say to me. Is it gonna add value? If it's a, yeah. If it's a hell of yes, let's go ahead and do it. If it's a, I'm not sure about it. I might call you in
1:17:42 three or four months when I am sure about it. If it's a no, because I've been on the sales side, I'll tell you no, I can't afford this right now 'cause I don't want you out there left hanging. So
1:17:52 here's an interesting thing that's been great for us. And we were talking about it earlier, but I want to make sure other people hear this. Is the application of AI in ourselves world, the last
1:18:03 two clients that we've sold, I'm not a good salesman. I would say I'm a great promoter. I have Daniel Purvis, he's our business development guy. He runs with it. He knows how to follow through
1:18:17 and get the emails and the quotes and just an amazing guy at all that I do what I call promotion, which is, send me down with you. In 30 minutes, we're going to laugh. We're going to probably
1:18:29 talk some shit. And we're going to get down to the nitty gritty bullet points. I think we can do this. You've got assets that we think we can do this with. Ball part price estimate is going to run
1:18:40 us this.
1:18:43 Me and or not, none of the - because I used to be on that site. For me, I've worn so many hats in this I know that your time. If I got your time and you need to laugh at it, because if time is so
1:18:56 uptight and tense and you don't know how to, most of the time I go in these offices, 99 of the people need like 30 seconds or 30 minutes, just to,
1:19:06 you know what I mean? 'Cause they got it all coming out of 'em. It's a nonstop brag of shit coming out of 'em. So if I get 30 minutes of your time, you
1:19:14 may have kids, we'll learn about them down the road. You may have all these things going on. I don't, not that I don't care. Right It's my job and what you can need for me, Revol, is nothing
1:19:23 about that. Right, 'cause you've probably already told three other salesmen about your kids this week. And none of them got in their car remembering any of that. And it didn't add any value to
1:19:33 your life or their life. And I want to build a personal relationship. But I think that comes after. If we start doing work together, we will build a personal relationship. And I've even gotten
1:19:43 cool with guys that I couldn't do business with, but because of the way they operated in the meeting, I'm like, Oh, you're cool If you need something, call me, right, if I can help. You need
1:19:53 an introduction to somebody, right? Yes. And I think that if you lay out like, if you're personable and you make me feel like, yo, we get like, the way I kinda lay it and the world may not like
1:20:04 this, but if I feel like you're gonna snitch on me, right? If me and the guys go and have too many beers and you're gonna go back to the boss, I'm not the guy that is gonna wanna be around the guy
1:20:12 that's so uptight. I wanna, if I can't laugh with you, if I can't be a human with you, I'm probably not buying from you. Right And if I can't be a human towards you, you should not buy from me.
1:20:26 Right. Because I think, as you know, you didn't sell. Sell as much as the tech or tool or whatever you're selling can be amazing. People don't buy from assholes. Yeah. Yeah. And then sometimes
1:20:39 being a asshole is this, did you got 30 minutes, we're here an hour, hour and a half later. Yeah. And I haven't bought anything from you.
1:20:49 I don't wanna be a dick either by saying just leave. But I need you out of my office, but I got, you know, I tell my guys like as we don't have, we have, I wouldn't even say we have sales guys.
1:21:01 We have Daniel's a business development guy. Yeah. And our biggest sales are work. Yeah. You know, absolutely. I get it. Yeah. That's how I get work. People see my equipment sitting on the
1:21:11 side of the road refueling at a drug stop. Boom. That's how we get work My pop-up all died in 2015 and born in 1932,
1:21:22 got into oil and gas in the 50s, lived in Odessa, in the 50s
1:21:29 and 60s, moved to Houston, ran to compressor companies that were very successful. When he sold a second one, he bought this ring that I wear. One thing that I got from my pop-up, he never went
1:21:38 to college. I don't think he finished high school. I think he got through 11th grade. Yeah. I don't think he had his high school diploma He
1:21:46 sold these two very successful compression companies.
1:21:52 my grandma's still around she's 93. When we buried pop-all she had this metal maid that they this and he was in the Marines and you know they had a couple of things on his casket but she had this one
1:22:07 metal maid and it said let my work speak for itself yeah
1:22:14 and she had that put on his casket because that's that's how my football was yeah like give us all about what I do day in day out mm-hmm that I don't I don't need to sell you you see my work you hear
1:22:28 about my work yeah that's it I give you the best I can give you yeah you know what I mean and if you don't like it I don't want to do business that's okay that's fine yeah you know I think we've lost
1:22:40 somewhere so one of the things that I think I drive hard at C3 is that we're a service company yeah you know yeah I remember the old frack days were like the the frack engineer would get the call from
1:22:54 the operator and the operator would be relying on how the burden or whatever that frack company is to propose the frack, engineer the frack, and be a service company in many ways. Now, there's
1:23:03 reasons why they got around from all that and whatnot, but. Yeah, that doesn't really happen anymore. They don't do it at all. And so what we're striving at over here to be as a service company.
1:23:12 Yeah. Right?
1:23:15 We're working on an acquisition of a big drone right now, like six foot wide drone. Yeah So that we can actually take it out and be not just watch our jobs from the surface looking for gas leaks
1:23:26 while we're pumping propane or whatnot to keep us safe. But in doing so, we're flying compressors stations. Yeah. Hey, we're going to go use this drone. We're going to get a field location so we
1:23:35 know where to put our equipment at. But in doing so, where is that compressor that this well or production facility this well is flowing to? We're already out here. We'll run it. If you got leaks
1:23:44 here or here and here. And one of the reasons this came about is we would go pump really good wells the pressure of the welcome back on these. production facility has never seen this much gas in 20
1:23:54 years. Yeah. And you've got gas flying at every joint where there's more problems. Yes, and so you got to be a service company. So we see enough operators having this issue where like,
1:24:08 how can we resolve their problem, make us safer, not increase the cost to where it's not, there's no value. Right. But then if we do do this, what value can we get back? Hey, in doing so, hey,
1:24:21 we found a 15 MCFL League day here, we found this and they're just a type of the way we did. It's service, we do all of our own engineering, we work with the engineers, we tell them what we're
1:24:33 doing, but we provide the turnkey service. Right. I think somewhere along the line, a lot of service companies became commodity companies. Yes, 100, and I think part of that too was with the
1:24:48 show revolution.
1:24:51 built out such big teams to oversee what's going on, that they designed their own fracks and they dictated what they needed. And I saw that on the tool side where they said, We want X, Y, and Z
1:25:02 tools in that well. And we never had a conversation about what pressures you're gonna see down whole, what kind of different rinsules you're gonna see down whole, you know, 'cause they might just
1:25:13 say they want a 10K aero set. But they're never gonna see 10, 000 pounds of differential, 'cause we're always gonna have that whole loaded. They might see 3, 500 pounds of differential. I was
1:25:24 gonna say, yeah, four mats. If they're lucky, you know? And so it's like, but then they, I say they, the operators at some point started dictating and not leaning on their service companies as
1:25:36 the experts. But with that, in the last 10 or 15 years, you'll see a lot of service companies quit hiring experts, quit expecting expertise. They didn't grow their business line Quit teaching
1:25:49 expertise. their new hands and they became commodity companies. One hundred percent. It's been a huge shift in the last 15 years. Huge. Huge. Yeah. One thing that's fun for us is luckily we're
1:26:02 the only ones that do what we do. Yeah. So kind of everybody looks at us to be the expert. Yeah. Right. But what we're seeing is where our better case results come in is when those engineers talk
1:26:13 with our engineers. They tell us what they've been doing. We think about it. You know what I mean? And we work together. Yeah. And all of a sudden the wells that we when my team is engineering
1:26:23 and well and we can only do with the data you supply us. Yeah. All right. When the engineering group wants to be a partner on it and they actually take in like ownership of it. Right. As
1:26:32 engineers do. The outcomes are always tenful better. Because now you have the guy that's operating the wheel every day. Bought it on what we're going to do. Hey, I do this, this and this and
1:26:42 here's my outcome And he understands what's going on and why. Yes. Because y'all worked on this together. He can go tell us boss. step-by-step why we do what we do and why we're doing it that way.
1:26:54 Yeah, and we're still the expert subject matters. Yeah. But what we've actually done is created more expert subject matters. Mm-hm. And better way for us to grow our businesses to get more people
1:27:06 educated in what we do. So I think there's a big issue with service companies right now. I think there's a few guys out there really working hard to build service companies. Yeah. That are service
1:27:18 companies But there hasn't been a big shake up in the tool, the amount of tools in the tool back. You come to the tool world, right? There's only certain tools that we have, a completions guy, a
1:27:28 production guy. There's only certain tools in the tool back that we've had for so many years. And I think interesting for us to see three is putting a new tool in the tool back. Yeah. So now the
1:27:39 next step for us is to teach people how the tool works. Yeah. Where do you apply the tool? How does the tool benefit you on this place or this place in application of the tool? Yeah, C3 has been
1:27:49 really good this year because. like your oil well, you know, we can take propane out there, but if you don't have a gas sales line on oil well, you put propane on your well, it's gonna be a big,
1:27:59 a lot of vapors coming out that production. We figured out how to stop and say, hey, look, if your production facilities can't handle X fluid, we can go get the right fluid, ie,
1:28:12 condensate, right, and put
1:28:18 that in the ground, and that way it matches up for the production, especially for the operator. You're not losing value by pumping a fluid that is then going to come up the ground and go out to the
1:28:23 vent. Why am I getting, oh, it's only a dollar a gallon. Well, it's 42 bucks a barrel. Yeah. That's two thirds of a barrel of oil. We can't be letting that value go. Being able to work with
1:28:35 operators, understanding production facilities, understanding their problems, lets us as a company be much more of a service company. But on average, I mean I, just had a lot of work done on
1:28:46 some wheels down, like I said, we're JV in on it. them what to do. There was no,
1:28:55 nobody kind of was a subject matter expert. They let you, they hired you to be the expert and then they let you be the expert. Yes. Yes. And it's interesting that
1:29:08 on some of the treatments, I was some of the work that was being done. I was like, Hey, man, like, you know, that sound like seems awful. This is how we do it every day. But why do y'all do
1:29:16 it this way? Don't know. This is why we do it this way. Yeah And like, Hey, can we cut this? Can we add that? Can we back off rate? Can we do whatever maybe? That's how we do it.
1:29:28 Interesting. That's a commodity to me. I think service companies have turned into commodity companies. They have a lot of the production chemical companies. I mean, if there's anybody that's more
1:29:36 than anybody, those guys, right? They're all selling about 80, 90 the same stuff. Yeah, chemical companies are funny. Oh, I don't know if I've mentioned it on here, here, but I was looking
1:29:46 at a whale.
1:29:50 very big major chemical company,
1:29:55 probably one of the largest chemical companies
1:29:59 was on the well, but not the one owned by Halliburton, the other one. Anyways, their hand came out.
1:30:08 To look at what we were doing, I was there with the operator, I was looking at buying this well. Their hand came out to refill the tanks and talk with us and
1:30:17 we had an iron sulfide issue And I was like, all right, dude, tell me, I hear iron. Iron sulfide, is this coming from my tubulars? Are my tubulars dead gradating? Or is my rock producing it?
1:30:29 Or is my rock producing? Is this happening in the formation in coming out? Or in like, in five years, am I gonna go scan casing in like all my casings of these Swiss cheese? 'Cause that's where
1:30:41 my iron in the iron sulfide has been coming from. It's like, well, it comes from down hole. And I'm
1:30:48 like, yeah, no shit Yeah, that part's evident. Right, you know what I mean, but I needed and he couldn't we stood there for like 15 minutes and finally was like I am gonna have to chase this
1:30:59 answer down somewhere else So were they injecting like an iron key later on the they were injecting some kind of corrosion inhibitor? No, and I never found out if it was
1:31:11 Mixing with the produced water me to precipitate that iron sulfide. Yeah, or if it was actually coming from the casing I never quite got that answer
1:31:21 But you see you would think if you're asking a guy that's putting it down your well if anybody should know This should be the guy that is that's out there. I'm trying it. He's my sales. He's not
1:31:31 only the guy on location filling the tape Yeah, but he's the sales rep. Yeah, he's our point of communication He's supposed to he's supposed to be the knowledge There used to be a time when there
1:31:43 were chemical guys all around that right that used to do that They'd roll their truck behind them and they'd pull up on a well and they'd be able to tell you and they'd be like Yeah, they do all
1:31:51 their little stuff, right? They'd be able to tell you, hey, this iron looks like iron that's coming off of the tubular versus the iron that has the look of a rock. Yeah. It's precipitating on a
1:31:59 rock. But I don't think that we're gonna get back to that type of service until operators turn in. Demand it? I think demand it, but I also think not all operators, like going back to the show
1:32:13 game, the shell revolution took a lot of engineering horsepower out of the conventional space Because it got hired. It was too hard to go work for, you're sitting there, you're working for an
1:32:24 operator, you got 200 vertical wells, paychecks been the same for the last three years, great guy to work for, but man, that company crossed the streets off from the 80, 000 more. And I'm home
1:32:36 every night, et cetera, right? And you're like, Yo, I gotta go do this. So you look at the last 15 years and you see this massive movement of expertise Expertise that moved out. Now what
1:32:50 happened is those guys were in the 30s and 40s when they left in the 2000s to go join them the big guys. The guys that own those operator companies the smaller world stayed back because that's what
1:33:01 they did. Now they're in their 70s and there's no one that take the helm of the ship and they're trying to figure out a way out. Dude half of my wells have come from guys that are over 70 years old
1:33:14 and legitimately the conversation has been hey Jim Bob mm-hmm
1:33:22 I don't mean this to be rude but if you thought about your secession plan yes absolutely with these wells yeah your kids don't want them yes your company will not survive without you yep what's your
1:33:40 plan yep I would love to have a couple of these what's your plan there's more I would tell you That position what a weird conversation. Oh It's awkward, right? But that's what I think, guys, like
1:33:53 if you were an I and you cannot play, look, I've been blessed. I'm surrounded by, on my, from C3, average employee outside of our field staff, right? I'm the youngest. I'm surrounded by upper
1:34:08 50s and all the way to the low 70s of guys that have been in this business a long time. My investment groups, some of the guys I work with, but you know, some of the guys I run with, they're age
1:34:17 groups Yep. They're all older men, so. And they look around, none of their kids aren't interested in oil and gas. They went and did other things. They saw dad or uncle's hard work, the dirty
1:34:29 boots, the late nights. Didn't want nothing to do it. Dad's worked hard to get him into a good degree. 'Cause they didn't want the kids out doing the same roughing around, they've been stomping
1:34:38 around. But since then, the oil company kept getting bigger or growing and all of a sudden the guy's 70 years old And he's like, I've got a P and A problem.
1:34:49 I got an X amount of PA on my ass. The wells are still good. But man, I want to take a break. I'm tired of reporting to the state every month. How do I get out? And there's no one lining up for
1:34:60 them. That's what I think is a huge open for a lot of young men right now. There are dudes dying to find young guys that understand and are willing to go do the work, the field work. And for me,
1:35:14 what I'm learning is, you can hire some accountant You can hire people to manage corporate business stuff. What you can't hire is that most of this data and this understanding of some of these
1:35:28 old-timers. Because once they walk away from the helm, it's gone. And you're like, so what's going to happen in these fields where these guys, they know everywhere. They drilled them, right?
1:35:40 Dude, there's a huge opportunity for young men to get in there and get the right mentorship to be like, hey, let me go learn from you guys Let me be the guy y'all teach. And if I'm good enough by
1:35:49 the time you end it, hey, I'll figure out a way to make sure you get your check every month. Yeah. Let me get in the game now. Let me buy you out slowly or something. I'll get rid of PA for you.
1:35:59 The slide that PA on me, I got a lot more years to figure it out than you do. And I mean. It's amazing how much,
1:36:08 it's amazing how much the nuance matters in conventional oil and gas. Oh yeah I don't know that because we're doing such a large scale with shale, I don't know that the nuance matters as much in the
1:36:25 shale as it does in conventional. Like basic gas lift theory, right? We're trying to reduce bottom hole pressure by adding bottom hole pressure, right? But we're bubbling this fluid, so we're
1:36:41 lightening the density, right? So anytime on top of a whale we have a choke or anything that's holding pressure back. That's like holding the brake while we're trying to press the gas, right?
1:36:53 It's keeping us from lifting that fluid out.
1:36:56 But somehow in the nuance,
1:36:60 I've come across a half a dozen wells that if you just rip the choke all the way open and like theoretically, you're taking all the pressure off the well head, this some buck ought to come around,
1:37:14 rip in and just take off like a jet plane.
1:37:21 But unless you hold it back, just 15 pounds, 20 pounds on the team. I don't know what it is, I can't explain it. I'm seeing that right now in my own wells. There's some wells that like just need
1:37:33 this certain amount of nuance. I got a well right now that at 300 pounds, tubing, it'll make 100 MCF a day. You rip it wide open, you would think you would drunk dramatically. Yep. And I get a
1:37:47 little bit of bone. first hour or two, and it drops below our normal production. None of this makes sense, but you come over and just tap that choke. Tap it over to 32, right? And she wants to
1:38:01 unload. And it just. So I've been working on this a lot, because, you know, being a service company, I get all these little cool tools, I have all these transducers, so we get to play, I'm
1:38:10 watching a lot of things, and what's interesting is like,
1:38:15 I think there's some physics behind that lift, right? And I don't know how to explain it, but I can tell you this, that if you open it full open, the well dead, if you bring air up on choke, my
1:38:30 gas rate's climbing so does my water, my well's unloading. There's something in that differential pressure, right? And don't know what it is yet, but we're definitely looking right now that we're
1:38:41 having that. Now, the interesting enough that I run a capstring on the well. Gas rates skyrocket 6, 700 in a day. but now I'm producing through the cap string, right? And how did that happen?
1:38:53 Yeah. Right? Yeah. So it's like, there's some interesting stuff that we're seeing with differentials and pressures that kind of like tripping me up a little bit right now. That's why I sent you
1:39:03 that chart the other night, I was like, Yo man, I need to understand what is this world doing right now? The old timers, the old timers had understood that nuance from an experience point of view.
1:39:15 Yes And now I gotta go chase to learn what they're doing. Now we gotta go figure it out. Again, when we should just be able - To call somebody. We should be able to call somebody and be like, Hey,
1:39:25 why do you think this happens? They've been doing it for 50 years. They've probably got a pretty good theory on it. And I mean, there's something like this well that we got right now, man. You
1:39:35 choke it just a little bit. Man, she wants to roar. You open it up and give it all the life it wants. It's like, Eh, I don't know. And once again, I think every well out here's a different
1:39:45 woman Yeah. You know, sorry. But they're all a different woman. They all have their own argumentative ways. They all have their own kicks bags. They have every single one of them. And that's
1:39:55 another thing that's fun about this business is every time you get, especially as a service company, every day is a different well. We're fighting a different problem. What is it? And how do we
1:40:06 apply what we've learned to the next step? And that's where I think conventional is gonna come back to. And I really think the shell game is gonna get zero back into it What tools have we used?
1:40:19 Where do we use them effectively? Right now, the shell game is cookie cutter.
1:40:25 Nobody's really changing frack design. Nobody's messing with a lot of these things. I mean, you know, but overall, it's pretty cookie cutter. If you're at company X, you're gonna drill the same
1:40:36 way, you're gonna frack the same way, you're gonna bring on to production the same way, it's one big cookie cutter operation. I think that's a part of what's kicking the shell well
1:40:48 I have a hard time believing show-wills are actually profitable. Yeah.
1:40:53 That's a whole 'nother discussion. Yeah, it's a whole 'nother stuff. Because there's a lot of, there's a lot of, New ones. There's a whole bunch of new ones and what's going on with show.
1:41:02 There's a lot of money that's been made. There's a lot of money that's been spent and how you move it around and position on your balance sheet. Yes. That tells you everything, right? 100 Like
1:41:17 you can move it around. I was working for a company, a
1:41:24 service company. I was district manager. I was managing our PL for the company. And when I had taken this position, I told them, Hey, I need to go home once a month. I'm in the Bakken. I need
1:41:38 to go home. My wife's in San Antonio. I need to go home once a month. I need a week every month to be home They said, sure.
1:41:48 three months I drove home and then they called me and they said hey are you driving home for your week off I said yeah I said no no no we want you to buy a plane ticket I said no I didn't bother me to
1:41:60 drive home I get to have my truck on down there they're like no you should buy a plane ticket and most of that is because when you spin the gas to go home that goes in one spot on your PL for your
1:42:14 district but when you buy a plane ticket it goes to a different spot and it makes your EBITDA look better for your district we want you to buy the plane ticket we also think it's safer yeah instead of
1:42:26 you driving 26 hours home some kind of I can get that argument there's a little bit of that yeah the majority of it was it goes to different spot yeah on your PL and you have a better even a I was
1:42:39 like
1:42:42 you know twenty three year old me you would have never show you that the manipulation of of Data too is a problem. It can, you can move it around. So that's where you say like, hash shell made
1:42:55 money depends on how you run your balance sheets. Yes, yes. You know, 'cause like - Service companies made money. Some of 'em. Yeah. Some of 'em. I mean, keep going back here. In the
1:43:07 beginning of the shell game, oh man, a lot of 'em made money, right? Now, like, I'm hearing people dropping left and right, freck groups. Yeah, yeah 'Cause it depends, yeah, we have an
1:43:20 asset that has never shown a profit, okay? But that asset has paid for the entry into multiple other assets. Oh, okay, I can get that. Right? Yep, yep. So, like, my accountant would tell
1:43:40 you I'm extremely unbankable. Yeah. Like, nobody wants to lend me any money on a personal note? Yeah. Because of the way I move my money around to pay less taxes and to get the most value of what
1:43:52 I'm actually making, I'm unbankable, right? Is the term she always uses, I'm like, that doesn't feel good, what are you trying to say? Yeah, it depends. Like, what did I do? I'm blanked.
1:44:04 But with that, yeah, we have an asset that is never on paper shown a profit, but it has bought tanks and it has bought pump jacks and it has reworked that unit and it's never lost money. Yeah.
1:44:18 But it has afforded us all these other entry points and it's been the revenue to other things, right? Yeah. And so I don't wonder if a lot of that is kind of the monopoly game going on with Shell.
1:44:31 I think that's true. Maybe at one point is that Exxon isn't dumb, Oxy isn't dumb, Diamondbacks not dumb. These ain't dumb people, no You know, and they, and Conoco Phillips, like they've got.
1:44:48 Huge teams of super smart people. Incredibly smart people. And they are nipple deep in shale. Yes. So it's hard for me to think
1:45:02 that there's not some benefit to it. No, agreed. But,
1:45:08 caveat, M. Tour here. Everybody
1:45:11 I just named still holds on a major conventional assets, period. I would also tell you why I think the majors have been getting involved in, 'cause if you look at a lot of the big acquisitions,
1:45:26 right, aqueous acquisition, Chevron's acquisitions, why are they buying these certain teams, right? I forgot who bought PDC,
1:45:36 Sivarovs, Sivarovs, maybe I forgot. Civitas. Civitas, and then I think they got bought, and at least I wanted, like what in the world with like Chevron one with Hess. Yeah. You know, well,
1:45:46 you got Guy on it. that are gone or wherever that big field is, right? Do they really want the Bockin' or same with the guys that bought PDC and a couple others? Are these big guys buying the
1:45:58 experience of Shell because the outside of the US. is where they actually reap the rewards of the show a bit about that? Yeah, they're gonna let us, it's like tech, right? They're gonna let us
1:46:09 go figure it all the way out. That is interesting because I've got some friends at Oxy They came from Anadarko, Oxy bought Anadarko. They rode the ship up, some of the smartest engineers I knew at
1:46:24 Anadarko got sent with Oxy to Algeria to make Algeria work. Yes, I know Buddy's in mind that with the OG that his job has been just around the world, China, where do you wanna go, right? So I
1:46:38 think a lot of the times that we think that these acquisitions are, are they buying PDP and all that? Come on, like, Chevron is - The majority of the production, I don't believe in the US.
1:46:49 anymore, I don't know for sure. You start looking at some of these super majors, what are they buying American shell companies for? Yeah. Is it that valuable or is it the things learned, ie,
1:47:04 HESS' RD division in the Bakken, these guys are doing things wild stuff, they're way ahead of the cutting edge of most other operators Chevron didn't cut the RD Bakken team when they just did their
1:47:16 acquisition. Then you start thinking, why don't they have another big asset in this show play over here, this show play here around the world? And you start thinking, why are these big boys
1:47:28 playing with these, they're not mom and pops, Diamondback's not a mom and pop operator, right? But they're not oxy, right? And you start looking at some of these big operators, why would you
1:47:40 buy them? The one thing that I think the Shell Revolution has done is it gave smaller guys that Harold the ride lose all these guys entry into to learning the newest stuff and the big guys are smart
1:47:54 enough just like to me when it comes to like solar and all this if you think solar is that valuable why the hell has an eggplant on it you don't think they got every engineering mine on the world
1:48:04 trying to figure this out the energies are gained right so why do these big boys want these these smaller American companies that have figured out the shell revolution they never had the horsepower
1:48:17 engineering to figure it out elsewhere yeah so instead of breeding it they buy it and but you keep looking why like why did that was just doesn't make sense oh well they want those big permeant do
1:48:28 they really want that big permeant I said or do they have this major play in another country south of the equator somewhere they don't know how to exploit it but the the rock characteristics look a
1:48:39 lot like those rock characteristics and they're gonna learn and they're gonna catalog and they're gonna play
1:48:48 But in 10 or 15 years, we've got all this experience, we've got all this data, we can go apply it around the world. We don't care about the six barrel of day horizontal. I do know, and I don't
1:48:58 think I'm allowed to name him, but I've got a friend at a super major, one of the, I'll narrow it down, one of the four biggest oil companies in the world
1:49:10 He said we are extremely good at developing oil plays. We are not good at operating oil plays. So we have, we have come to understand that it's good for us to get in, develop the oil play, pull
1:49:30 our cream off the top, sell it to somebody that can operate it. Yes, yes And I mean, that's where you get guys like, he'll be running it, right? Yeah. That's where you get the marriage. Well,
1:49:41 those guys came in and bought a big chunks and they're good at taking that and where these guys just, they got their 2X, they doubled their money, you know, and they got out. Right? We don't
1:49:53 need the headache. So once again, I think that's where there's so much opportunity right now. If you don't want to have a boss,
1:50:04 and I say that saying, I still have bosses, I have a board, you know, I have a bank account that is the boss of everything, right? You know, it checks everything And if you really want to dive
1:50:15 in and create your own headway future in this business, there's this massive opening going on right now in the conventional plays, like we were just saying, yeah, I mean, to have opportunity, go
1:50:27 join some small operating company that's got some wells they need to engineer, make a deal with the boss, say, Hey, man, I got this, you taught me, Hey, I'll take over the, the, the, the P
1:50:36 and A, I'll cover the books, I'll leave you in for 15 carry, you go to the house, thank you for the way in the minute you know the deal is over you take over that 15 interest again and you're back
1:50:47 at it. And you're running and it didn't cost you20 million raise. You didn't have to go find, you know, every family member to put in diamond, right? And then you got to worry about ruining
1:50:58 grandma's retirement, right? Like, and I think there's a massive opportunity that so many people are failing to see because they want to chase what's sexy. Vertical wells aren't sexy. Yeah.
1:51:11 They're not. No But the freedom that a good set of vertical wells can give a man, and the ability that it lets him start with is different. You can't go by, if you wanted my treatment, good way
1:51:25 to think about it. My average treatment's coming in sub 20, 20, 000 a well, that's everything all in, sometimes on a big well, maybe 30.
1:51:35 The same treatments I'm doing, roughly the same type of treatment, in the Bakken on these horizontal wells.
1:51:46 Like we're coming in sometimes, you know, eight, nine hundred thousand a well. Just service, not including the commodity. So I'm over here doing these treatments that are all in fluid commodity,
1:51:57 chemistry, all in for under 20, 30 grand, right? Yeah, that's an area I can play in. Most of us can, right? And that's what I'm saying. Like the perfect place is where, hey, if you go do
1:52:09 this, the only guys paying me that kind of money to do horizontal is there's guys that are massive RD budgets, so the big, big dudes, I get back to saying, hey, if a guy can scrounge up a few
1:52:21 wells, right, figure out a little bit of managing, you can probably get a partner like me to come in and say, hey, look, you know, we'll lay out service, we want some on the back, you know
1:52:32 what I mean? And do some things and you can still will and deal in this business. And when you're playing with the bit, there's no willing and dealing. There's no, this is what it is There's a
1:52:42 line of the saying and that's it.
1:52:45 you know, being able to will and deal and sit down with the guy and say, hey, you got this, I got that, you need this, I need that. Let's figure out how together we can make something out of
1:52:55 something, neither one of us got nothing without each other. Right. And the conventional space still, I think it allows that to happen. Right. Right. You know, I don't think you're gonna get
1:53:04 that kind of camaraderie between, you know, majors. Yeah. I'm drillin'. Yeah. And so. Yeah, you talk about not having a boss That's one of my problems is that I have been so gung-ho about not
1:53:18 taking any investment money from anybody. A hundred percent of what I've done. It's the right people, it's the right thing. And I battle it all the time. A hundred percent of what I've done has
1:53:30 been cash flow.
1:53:33 But there's a well sittin' up here that should make eight to 10 barrels a day. He's about 45 grand. Yeah to save 45 grand to go work on that well. 'cause I'm working on my other wells, you know?
1:53:47 This one might only take seven or8, 000, so I get seven or8, 000 saved up, sell a couple of little oils, I go get it, good. And I keep thinking I'm gonna get to this well, right? It's like
1:53:57 that's true freedom, but it's also at the cost of growth. You know, there's this, I go back and forth all the time on this of how fast I wanna grow, but who do I wanna be beholden to? I would
1:54:10 tell you from experience, the most important thing isn't money. It's who you get money from.
1:54:19 I am blessed beyond all measure. The guys I got that have came into my world, financed us to continue to grow and go, Oh, dude, you couldn't find better people. Yeah. But they're businessmen,
1:54:31 right? But that wasn't how I always was. My first round of investors, great guys, great intent, but they didn't, I think, fully understand the oil business and the consumption of capital. If
1:54:43 you are going to make a run in this - business doing certain things. Access to capital and the ability to do that and many times this is the world business. People hate hearing it but we light a lot
1:54:52 of dollars on fire to go miles down the road. Yeah. Oh yeah. It doesn't do much, it's just certain things. So I took my first round of money, those investors were great guys but as they started
1:55:04 scaling I needed different investors with different knowledge into industry. So the guys I have right now, be on blessed with
1:55:13 One is a guy that really has a lot of background in oil and gas, but from the stock perspective he knows when to trade and sell you. That's what he does, hedge fund type guy, right? Then I got
1:55:24 another guy who's a real estate guy but UT graduated at UT went
1:55:39 on to get a lawyer degree. He's in real estate, but he's friends with the biggest of the biggest oil guys in Texas 'cause he's a UT guy, he's on the alumni, he knows them all. I have another guy
1:55:40 who's a tech guy, not from Texas, built one of the. first emails that we that was ever used web now, um, built a couple big companies have sold them off and he sits on the board and he's a
1:55:52 partner and investor. All brings different pieces of the pie that I couldn't dream of. You have a tech issue? We go to this board member. Mm hmm. That's what he's done his whole life. He's not
1:56:03 an oilman. They're not just adding money. They're adding value. Massive value. They're adding value to your organization member. They're no, they're not investors or team members. Interesting.
1:56:13 Right They bought to be into the team. Yeah. So when we did this raise of money, when I was introducing them, bring them in, you know, they always ask you, what do you need the money for? I
1:56:24 don't need the money to grow. Well, they've heard all that. What I really focused on was what I couldn't buy. Yeah. Well, I don't need you because your money, I can go get a lot of dues. I'll
1:56:31 just give you money. But I can't find a guy like you with access to people like you that believe in what we're doing and also have the ability And this is going to sound awkward for some people you
1:56:42 want investors to have the ability to lose whatever they invest in and be okay and happy and can shake hands and walk away yeah that's hard to find because you find it when people are losing their
1:56:55 money and they're getting desperate about finances it's not fun they make terrible decisions and everyone around them you as the operator or you're the person that took the investment he's gonna now
1:57:06 be dealing with their personal family problems mm-hmm right I've been blessed with the that makes sense the guys that I got where if we flush it all tomorrow
1:57:18 to them this is probably a rounding error in next year's taxes
1:57:24 and I know that sounds crazy to think about but it changes the investment style and it also changes the way you're able to scale your business I'm reading a book right now called the super Americans
1:57:37 okay
1:57:39 I was written like the maybe the 60s have you read it no I haven't known it's called the super Americans It's about like millionaire Texans and like their egos and all this stuff. They're fun. It's
1:57:50 talking about Clint Murchison. Okay. And he rounds everything to the million. So he's like, oh yeah, I deal with seven and a half. Seven and a half million. Yeah. And somebody asked him like,
1:58:02 they flew to Singapore to buy this building. Yeah. And they outbid everybody else. And they were like, well yeah, we didn't have to go talk to our investors or anything You know, we've got the
1:58:14 authority to make the check, right? And they actually played one more zero than
1:58:23 they calculated and anticipated. And he was like, well yeah, a surrounding error. Yeah. Just one zero. No, literally. 75 million versus 75 million. But he's like, he's like, if the deal
1:58:35 works, the deal works. It's a rounding error. You know, it's a rounding error for me. I will tell you, it changes So when you're looking for invest - They're playing in that - field of like, he
1:58:46 says, I don't care if it's100 or100 million, I
1:58:50 look at it as a percentage of return. Am I going to get 20 back on100, am I going to get 20 back on100 million? That's what matters to me. That's it. Deal size. No problem. I'll get the money.
1:59:03 I'll find somebody. We'll figure that out. Yeah. I want to see the percentage. I will tell you, if you get good partners,
1:59:12 it becomes incredibly fun because the thing that I've got out of it is I'm not who I was, so I did a, you know, we had won a digital wildcatters' Technite. I won one of those. And then I had done
1:59:24 a podcast, you know, with Colin and all the guys there. And you know, I would tell you I'm not the same guy I was then. Really? And here's why. Investors, what they brought for our company.
1:59:37 Yeah. Not just capital. They brought mentorship, leadership, showing us how to do things, bringing in the right Um, teaching me how to be a CEO, how to be an executive. I never went to, I
1:59:50 went to university for a few classes. I didn't stay long enough to get it. Yeah. No, no, no, that makes two of it. I got what I needed and I split, right? Organic Kim was enough. I got the
1:59:60 equation and reran. And so I get things that you can't go get. Yeah. Right. How do you, how do you operate around a couple of guys that every day wake up and run billion dollar operations? Well,
2:00:13 they pull you to the side and say, Hey, do this. I want you to do that. Well, I come into her like a dad or like an uncle figure, right? So the right investors, I think, make all the
2:00:22 difference, especially for guys like us at our place in the business, right? But I mean, you get the right guy.
2:00:31 45 grand work good, but then he asks you, how does he apply 40, 450, 000, right? That's so sometimes My advice is, if you can grow out a cash flow. great. However, there becomes a time where
2:00:47 you're going to say, I need my cash. My kid got sick. Yeah. My dad needs something that cash I'm harvesting. I need it. My grandfather told me a long time ago, the easiest way to get rich is
2:00:59 doing on somebody else's money. And when you go meet all these guys that I'm involved in that are businessmen, these guys are building200 million buildings with 10 their money and 90 of somebody
2:01:11 else's money
2:01:13 And then so you start thinking like you're like, Well, this is how you do it? Yeah. So I would tell you and I would tell every other guy, I've took the kicks and the nuts with investors. I've
2:01:24 had it when the investment stopped. I had to go find new investors. So I've been through the whole good side, bad side, lessons learned. None of them were horrible, right? But I will say if you
2:01:35 can find good people that believe in what you're doing, believe in your goal, and you get with the people, and I think this is a major part. Never, I don't do business with my family members. I
2:01:47 will not do business with a family member. Not that I don't own my family. But when you start trading big dollars that can affect, no one in my family has the ability to lose a million bucks 'cause
2:01:59 no one's got a million bucks. Right, it changes what they have for dinner. It absolutely changes, right? And when you can go find some guys where you know that that million they gave you was
2:02:12 really because, hey, I could go to the casino tonight or I could go hang out with you and maybe go see you come up. I think the big thing for my investors, they want to see me do well. They don't
2:02:25 give a shit about the returns on their money that I can make them. This thing could be a billion dollar company, it doesn't change their outcome. But they know it changes mine. And so I think that
2:02:35 when you find investors,
2:02:38 you have to find the guys that actually want to be Vasters and partners a lot of guys want to give you money That's why I don't do private equity. My equity is private people's private equity. If
2:02:49 you go to see what I'm saying, this isn't right, these individuals line up with their own pocketbook, they're not asking people, What about this and all this? It's private, so I call it private,
2:02:60 private equity. And by doing so, you get buy-in. When you take it from a big firm, not one of those dudes selling that deal at a firm cares, 'cause they're getting the promote I've never done a
2:03:12 deal with a promote. Like, hey, if you're gonna be in, we're in. I'm not taking no money off the table just 'cause I got you to give me money. The money you're giving me goes right back into the
2:03:22 business we're growing. And you start seeing that when people look at it, they're like, hey, okay, okay, okay, you've put X amount of your own time and money in and you're taking our money and
2:03:33 you're like writing off on the sunset with it? That's like what I was telling you about with our new drill It's like I've seen so many,
2:03:42 I've seen so many. um, deals, like new drill deals where the guys like got200, 000 of promote on a million dollar oil. You're taking up one fifth. And it's like, it doesn't matter if they set
2:03:56 casing or not, this dude's going to make his 200 grams. Because he makes it first. Remember, he makes his promote before he makes it off the top. That's right. And then if you set casing,
2:04:06 you've now back ended him into 15. That's right. He can elect to take 15 of the well It's like you're taking all the risk investing on this guy. Why do you think investments dried up? But some
2:04:21 guys might be good enough. Some of the geologists might be good enough that their investors are willing to take their risk for them because they have such a good track right now. Yeah. But to me,
2:04:31 that's not the average. That just feels slimy. Yeah. You know? For me, it felt awkward. Yeah. It's like, you're going to let me take a, it's like for me, it was like, you're going to let me
2:04:42 you're gonna give me a month salary when the revenue is not always the best, right? You're going to let me take a draw every month and not even a draw. You're going to flat out pay me with your
2:04:52 money. I can't go take an extra 50 grand when you're already getting supplied me for the next two years. I know I don't have to worry about a roof or my head or food in my bank.
2:05:01 But once again I think that that's some of the change that's got to come right now with our generation where if you're going to go get cash it's not the old days. You got to be able to bring. So I
2:05:10 think the first time I raised money I showed up in West Texas on the deal that got me the cash to get to where we're at today. And that's why I'm so thankful for the very first deal. Yeah. A lot of
2:05:20 kicks in the nuts. You learned a lot of hard things. Always. And I want to I want to pause and say to anybody like wanting to start their own deal and just being hesitant or they don't know where
2:05:34 to start or they're uncomfortable with it. Just freaking do it. The first one you're gonna probably do It's some of it's. probably gonna suck. That's right. You're gonna spend a year or two
2:05:47 getting out from under it. That's okay, 'cause you've gotta get that one. My dad, my dad's now five years sober. Hasn't had a drink in five years. His mom was an alcoholic. He'll tell you, he
2:06:00 was an alcoholic for sure. Since I was born, he's always said, you can't have two unless you have one. You gotta have the first drink to have the second drink. It's the truth The same deal with
2:06:14 your deals in your companies. You gotta jump, you gotta go. You've gotta do the first one, you've gotta get it under your belt. It teaches you what you need to be successful when it, when
2:06:23 success, so it's interesting for me, I look at it like this, right? Good Lord's blessed us beyond all measure. Yeah. There's no reason my company and me should be sitting in the position where
2:06:34 we're at. None. Outside of, I think, hard work and a good idea. Yeah. You know, other than that, it's all - We put in the hours Yeah, it's all organized by somebody bigger than me. Otherwise,
2:06:43 I wouldn't have done it for me. Yeah, but I say that to say, I got my nuts kicked in by good people though on my first deal. The guys were not bad guys. And thank God God put them in front of me
2:06:55 because they did let me get to this point. And you learn about that. And then so you take them lessons and you're like, what are my investors right now? Same investment group, they just bought
2:07:07 out my other investors, right? I go into his office to pitch my deal for the first time, right? I sit across from him, he's telling me how much my deal sucks. I'm full of shit. There ain't
2:07:18 nobody in the world gonna put propane down wells and make better wells or they'd have already been doing it. You're full of shit. Then he stops the meeting, no shit. And says, my chiropractors
2:07:28 here, in my office, I'll be back in 10 minutes, don't move. We had a 30 minute meeting and the 30 minutes just clicked. But he says, don't move. And I'm sitting there like, fuck, this guy's
2:07:39 told me. Everything is wrong with besides the fact I'm bald, right? Like this guy's way after everything he can tell me, right? Yeah. He walks back in the room and he goes, all right, how do
2:07:48 we make this deal? And I'm like, what are you talking about? You just told me that I'm a dumb ass. And I got the stupidest thing and he's like, look man, for a guy to take my money, I need to
2:07:60 know he's willing to take the blow. Because if you lose my money, you can have a blow or two coming. But I need to know you're honest with me. Yeah. Dude, 15 minutes later, I walked out of
2:08:09 there, got in my truck, I was like, it's over. Like we're done, you know? And so I say that to say, if I didn't go take the kick and the dick from the first round of funding, I'd have never
2:08:19 had the balls to stand in front of men like that and just square, right? 'Cause you're looking at a guy that has the ability to control your life, not to control, to massively affect the outcome
2:08:32 of your long life. Yeah. And 99 of the time, I think before, I went through the first round of dealing with investors. would have buckled. Yeah, I probably would have been like, yeah, you
2:08:43 know, right? So sorry, you know, oh my god, oh my god, you know, no, I just said, there's no, I know what I got. I got a good service company. Well, you just got this one truck and a few
2:08:52 jobs and some data points and your patentate were shit because slumber Jake can just roll you over and you're like, you know, this guy's you know, it was way more than me. I'm in his ivory tower,
2:09:01 right? And then you come to find out, and I know he just wanted to make sure that if he gave you his money, you're going to be a man about it. Yeah, back it up. And so I would tell you, if you
2:09:10 find the right people,
2:09:14 sometimes in life we're surrounded by people we don't know that can impact our life more than we know. But because of our own either ignorance and or arrogance, we tend to not use the tools that the
2:09:28 give the words put right in front of us. And that's people. I don't think that we would have got to where we're at as a company without the people that we were surrounded by. And they all kept
2:09:40 every time that it was over, we should have packed the doors, closed the doors up, no jobs on the book. Every time it was something horrible, there'd be a phone call. Yeah. And out of nowhere,
2:09:51 you're like, yo, the next breath of life, right? We'd go do it well and you hear it didn't do no good and the operator's not calling you. And then all of a sudden, 90 days later, you just so
2:09:60 like, how the company really kept going at one point in time, I'm sitting in an airport, everything's going to shit, I open up embarrassed, I'm just like, let me just check. No, we did those
2:10:09 wills 90 days, let me just check. And to this day, my phone has a picture that I took that day where that embarrassed chart is real down and then all of a sudden there's a spike and it's got two
2:10:20 months and it's keep climbing. I'm in the middle of Dallas, Fort Worth Airport saying, we got a company. Yeah, it worked. Thirty minutes earlier, I was thinking, how do I get out of this?
2:10:32 Yeah, we're having a hard time in the pocket. Where will I man? How do we get some traction up here?
2:10:40 He ticked in, flights, introduced introductions, all that kind of shit. Get a phone call from one company up there that heard about us. Hey, do you all pump propane? Yeah. Hey, we got a
2:10:51 customer who's looking for somebody that can pump propane. We don't do it. But because we're good service, we're trying to help them find somebody. Yeah. The biggest operator in the block?
2:11:04 Holy shit So we beat our heads up, giving it our way, the whole way. Yeah. And the minute that we all sit back from it, I'm like, oh, shit, guess that didn't work. The phone rings, and once
2:11:18 again. So I think that's the other thing is, I consider the good Lord.
2:11:24 Some would say it's staying in the game. But it would be hard if you stay in the game to not position yourself for the people that can carry you. Yeah. Right. And I think you would probably agree
2:11:33 that the longer you in it, the more people you meet, You don't know how they're going to fit into the -
2:11:40 You know what? But they're on the chess game board. I mean, how did we meet? I don't know if you remember the first time I met you.
2:11:48 I remember I was at Lufkin. Okay. Was at Lufkin oil and gas. I was 20 years old. And I met you at the petroleum club in San Antonio with your dad. That's right. Yup. That's right. And they had
2:12:02 given me a50, 000 salary and a brand new F250
2:12:07 at 20 years old Oh, yeah. Dude, I was king of the world. The world was grand. Nothing could not be - 'Cause I remember you had just like gotten engaged, I think. And I got engaged. I think you
2:12:19 just gotten engaged. And I was like, dude, you're 20 getting engaged. And now I'm like, you're the only guy I know that figured it out with the right person, like you're in good shape. Yo,
2:12:27 they check this out. That first paycheck I got, 1, 381. Oh, you're king, dude.
2:12:35 1, 381. It was so much money to me. at 20 years old, that
2:12:42 I wouldn't bought my girlfriend. Wasn't even my fiance. I wouldn't bought her a brand new duck hunting shotgun so she could duck hunt with me. Yeah. 'Cause you knew next week was another one.
2:12:55 That's right. I bought a salary, baby. And if I get a sale, I'm rolling, right? You know, I love, this business is a fun place, man And far too often, do I see young guys are age, and it's
2:13:12 not for everybody, right? But I see young guys are age where I'm like, dude, you could be rolling right now on your own. You may not have the title, or you may have a cooler one that no one
2:13:22 cares about. I got a couple of titles at the three companies I oversee, I'm just gonna be honest with you. None of them mean shit to anybody inside the company. I made all of my titles The latest
2:13:33 one I've stuck with is Chief Turkey. So, I was once to ask, companies that is like a sister company of ours, and they needed to find a day to introduce me in a meeting. And I asked if I could, a
2:13:46 literal, I try to get this part of my business card, was a chief operating dumbass, you know what I mean? COD. I was trying hard, CODA. I was trying really hard, and everyone was like, you
2:13:60 can't do that. I was like, trust me, whatever guy reads this on the other end of this is gonna get exactly what I'm talking about I don't wanna be the one in the room with answers. I just wanna be
2:14:11 the one in the room that's in the room. Yeah. And I think that if a lot of young guys, man, I see a lot of smart young engineers do. Yeah. That it's like, and maybe 'cause they've never seen
2:14:21 this side of the business. They've seen the big ivory towers in downtown Houston, they know which - And there's these guys in two
2:14:30 and3, 000 shoots, they're uno, they're not unapproachable, they're unapproachable 'cause people have put them on a pedestal. Yes. Yes, they're still doing this.
2:14:39 They're still dudes. Yeah. They give you the time of day. They're busy. Yeah. But they care about you. One thing I've also learned is as I become more busy and my schedules turn into a world I
2:14:52 never believed but still don't understand it sometimes. Often people get irritated with me because
2:14:59 you didn't get back, you're like, No, I'm busy. Yeah. But the world - It takes me again. Yeah, exactly. Get me up Yes. And if you don't get it - and I have to tell a lot of people, 99 of the
2:15:11 time, if you want to get a hold of me, you better be before noon. Yeah. Because by the afternoon, I start work every day at four o'clock. So my day - My day - My day - Hours is that good. God.
2:15:21 Yeah. So you're open, you got the afternoon to get a hold of it. Yeah. Otherwise, I'll see you in the morning. And I think that there's something to have in that control of your own life and
2:15:32 building something. But I will say
2:15:35 the place that starts in the conventional business, you know? It's too easy there. What does it say? So we met and then
2:15:44 shoot, we talked for like two or three, four months, you shared some contacts with me, you tried to help me out as I was kind of like a young salesman, service, hands, whatever. And then we
2:15:57 didn't talk for - Well, I disappeared off the planet. You disappeared off the planet, okay. I disappeared. Cool. I mean, I since - Well, I went to North Dakota for three or four years. I knew
2:16:07 you were up there, but that's right about the time where I went out on my own, right? And I started developing my own IP, and then I've had to figure out how to build patents. So that's a lot
2:16:16 where that comes from is this, you know, I tell people like the last seven years, I think people have seen me around kicking around the last four a little bit more, but it took us seven years to
2:16:26 get to this point, right? So - And then you - I was at gas, I went to gas for acting. That's probably was the last time That was that gas wreck when - I met you all, yep. And then we were both
2:16:41 at Tad, at Troy's - Golf tournament. Golf tournament. I was like, Fuck, I know, Tad. That was my first time kind of showing back up on the whole - And then, boom, we were running again and
2:16:52 talking about all kind of cool stuff. And you can see that in a few years I spent the way in the corner researching and learning, so was it, yeah, I mean, I went, yeah. Like you said, you
2:17:02 don't know. That's one of the things I love about oil and gas. And I try to treat everybody, like, from the
2:17:10 roused about and the pumper, all the way to the CEO with respect and dignity, because when we met, like, I was a plunger lift sales service tech. I like to call myself a salesman. I give a
2:17:32 presentation at the Victoria API. I wish I would have recorded it Because like when I replay my head, I didn't know that. about what I was presenting on. But you knew it that day. That day I was
2:17:43 hot stuff, you know? 15 years ago. And so like you've gotta, you don't know where those people are gonna end up, where their career and their life is gonna take them. And when you treat
2:17:56 everybody, like you did with me. Just be great, man. With the dignity and respect, like who knows where it's gonna carry me. Our operations manager, me and him, Dave, we've been running
2:18:08 together about 20 years now. And he taught me something in my first
2:18:13 six months of knowing Dave, and he probably told me the thing that has probably been the biggest influential thing in the oil business for me, which is beware of the ash you kicked today, 'cause
2:18:24 it's the ash you kissed tomorrow. And I say it that it's saved. Or one of our guys right now, one of our lead guys in the field, Reagan's all this. He's in Wildwell School this week. Okay
2:18:36 Houston, right? And there's and he got lucky because he's in a class with only one other gentleman. This gentleman, as you know, if you know a well-controlled school, it's every two years you
2:18:44 have to take it. Yep. This guy's on his 16th Wild Well-controlled school. All right. He knows our head of engineering, Susan Starr. Okay. He met Susan 20, maybe 30 years ago on a drill rig in
2:19:00 the North Slope of Alaska. Wow. You never know where they're gonna come and where the link's from The oil business is big, but it's small. So small. And I will tell you, the stressor for C3 and
2:19:17 our service companies is this image that we got, this reputation that we got is the one thing that we can't let get tampered, right? 'Cause once it's out, as individuals, once your name is
2:19:32 no good on a deal, it's over All you have is your name in the oil field. It sticks with you. All you have is your name. We started this conversation about that operator. Get your money up from
2:19:46 that operator. Oh yeah, they sent me money, yep.
2:19:49 Your name is all you have. And every time that operator's name comes up, anywhere near me, every single one of the room says the same thing. Yep. And so then you start seeing why does that person
2:19:60 have a hard time getting rigs? Why does this person have a hard time getting help? And you're like,
2:20:06 oh man, you left us hanging a few times here and here. Yeah. And you know, there's a funny story that I would take to this. You know, there's a story in that book, The Frackers, about Harold
2:20:16 Hamm and Aubrey McClendon at the time being both at Oklahoma City Thunder Game and, you know, Harold sitting down there in no one in the room and the whole Colosseum knows what Harold Hamm is.
2:20:27 Aubrey walks in the, oh, Aubrey
2:20:30 McClendon, you know, you're the man, you've done it all, right? And what nobody knows is the guy that they all cheered for owed the guy at the other in the room money
2:20:39 And it's like, yo, yeah, I'm cool. And
2:20:42 that's one of those, beware of the ass you kick. Listen, this business, man, you wouldn't believe how many old fret cans that I would just fret cans with, right, calling me up. Interesting
2:20:53 enough, there were guys when I was at GasFreck that couldn't stand me, made my life holy hell. And now they're reaching out to me for jobs.
2:21:04 Not saying that I don't entertain it, but - Right Probably didn't change the ass so you were then. But if you didn't like my personality then, when I had to conform to the business entity I was
2:21:18 with, you're probably not going to like it now that it's unchanged.
2:21:23 I had a guy that I worked for. He was my boss. And I just couldn't stand him as a boss.
2:21:32 Try to solicit my company. But I guess he didn't do it of research to realize it was me? Yeah, try to solicit my operating company and there is fun and back and out You know I was maybe a little
2:21:44 less candid than I should have been yeah Or maybe a little more candid a little less coof than I should have been but like You also either you have respect for people you don't you know, let me also
2:21:55 hard for me So let me say this though our business is also one that is at times A choice set of words is the only kind of words that Bring loud enough to make an understanding happen. Yeah, right
2:22:10 and there's been times where I've looked back at like the way I reacted yeah to certain things Probably wasn't Me yeah, it was unbecoming me right and it was it who I was but then I go back and say
2:22:28 If you're willing to get pushed around in this business, they'll push you out Yeah, so sometimes in life you need to actually cut lines and it's okay draw lines. Yeah And there's a few people from
2:22:39 my past that have came up and they've wanted it.